All posts tagged Crassus

The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 1

I’d just bought the Oxford University Press edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars off Amazon when I walked into my local charity shop and found the old Penguin edition going second-hand for £2. So I snapped it up and am now reading the two editions interchangeably.

The OUP edition (1996)

The OUP edition (1996) is translated and introduced by Carolyn Hammond. She began to put me off almost immediately when, in her preface, she writes:

The subject-matter of The Gallic War is potentially distasteful, even immoral, for the modern reader. The drive to increase territorial holdings, high civilian as well as military casualties, and the predominance of economic motives for organised aggression – all these belong to an accepted norm of international activity in the ancient world, and hence need careful introduction and explanation…

This begs all kinds of questions. For example: Why are you devoting so much time to translating a work which you find ‘distasteful and immoral’? It’s the same question as arose when reading Mary Beard’s history of Rome: Why has an ardent feminist dedicated her life to studying a world of toxic men?

Second problem is Hammond’s assumption that war to increase territory and incur high casualties for economic motives is somehow unique to, and restricted to, the ancient world and so needs ‘careful introduction and explanation’. Really? Had she not heard of the Yugoslav wars or the Congo wars, which were ongoing as her book went to press? Or the Second World War, possibly? Korea, Vietnam, Biafra, Afghanistan. The world always has wars. Not understanding them means you don’t understand the world you live in.

In fact Hammond’s statement that the concept of ‘war’ needs explaining is rather patronising, isn’t it? Her attitude bespeaks a certain kind of academic condescension, a voice from the bosom of woke academia telling people who have bought a book about a famous war that she needs to explain what ‘war’ is, and that some readers might find ‘war’ ‘distasteful, even immoral’. Maybe her edition should have warning stickers on the cover: ‘This book about an eight-year-long war may contain scenes of a violent nature’. Just in case the purchaser of a book titled ‘The Gallic War’ hadn’t figured that out for themselves.

In her introduction Hammond covers a lot of material but in a consistently confused way. She tells the story (which I’ve read so many times I am now heartily sick of it) about Publius Clodius Pulcher being found in Caesar’s house dressed as a woman and trying to infiltrate a women-only religious ritual. She refers to it mainly to lead up to Caesar divorcing his wife and making his ‘famous’ declaration that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. But she tells the whole thing in such a cack-handed way that I was left dismayed by her inability to tell a simple story.

Hammond refers to key aspects of ancient Rome, such as the consuls, in an oddly throwaway manner as if we all ought to know about this already. Frequently her prose is, well, questionable:

This was the year of the conspiracy of Catiline. It was also the year in which the sacrosanctity of the people’s tribunes was raised once more, this time through the prosecution of an old man called Rabirius, a prosecution behind which Caesar’s hand was detected. (p.xvi)

a) That last phrase doesn’t inspire confidence in her ability to express herself, does it? b) This is all she tells you about both Catiline and Rabirius. I don’t care about Rabirius but if she’s going to mention the Catiline conspiracy, surely it deserves a decent explanation rather than a nine-word sentence. And why does she write the elaborate and clunky phrase ‘the conspiracy of Catiline’ rather than the more smooth and usual ‘the Cataline conspiracy’.

It feels very much like Hammond has a bullet point list of issues to get through but doesn’t have the space to explain any of them properly, instead cramming them into clunky, broken-backed sentences which shake your confidence in her ability to translate anything by anyone into decent English prose.

As happens with many writers, Hammond’s uncertain grasp of English phrasing reflects a clumsiness in conceptualising the ideas she’s trying to express:

In 60 BC Pompey, Crassus and Caesar formed an unofficial pact which came to be known as the ‘first triumvirate’ (on the analogy of the triumvirate of Anthony, Octavian and Lepidus in 43).

I know what she’s trying to say but it’s badly phrased because it’s badly conceived. The first triumvirate wasn’t formed on the analogy of the second triumvirate because the second triumvirate, quite obviously, hadn’t happened yet; it only happened 17 years later. She means something like, ‘this pact is now referred to as the first triumvirate because the same kind of deal was arranged 17 years later between Anthony, Octavian and Lepidus. Historians came to refer to them as, respectively, the first and second triumvirates’. I see what she’s trying to say, but her phrasing literally doesn’t make sense. Again it feels like a) an item on her checklist which she had to cram in but b) didn’t have the space to explain it more clearly and so ends up doing it clumsily.

It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in her ability to understand and translate complex content from the Latin if, when given free rein to express herself in English, she produces such mangled ideas and tangled-up sentences.

Hammond’s account of the politicking around the triumvirate ticks it off her checklist but isn’t as clear as Beard, Holland or Scullard. You need to understand what the first triumvirate was: that Caesar brokered a deal between the rivals Crassus and Pompey whereby Crassus used his money to bribe voters and Pompey used his influence in order to pass laws and get decisions they each wanted:

Pompey wanted land and money awarded to his veterans who’d returned from his wars in Asia Minor in 62
Caesar wanted to be made governor of Gaul where he scented an opportunity to acquire military glory and, thereby, political power
and Crassus wanted to be awarded governorship of Syria, from where he planned to launch a military campaign into Armenia and Parthia which would bring him not only glory but troves of Eastern loot

It was a deal between three uneasy rivals to manipulate political elections behind the scenes using Crassus’s money and to ensure they each got their way. They didn’t abolish the tools of the Roman constitution; they took them over for their own purposes. Many contemporaries (for example, Cicero) and later historians took the signing of this pact in 60 BC as the defining moment when the old forms of Roman politics were eclipsed by the power politics and rule of Strong Men which was, after 30 years of increasing instability and civil war, to lead to the rise of the ultimate strong man, Octavian.

It would have been nice to have learned something about ancient Gaul but instead Hammond wastes the last seven pages of her introduction on another tick box exercise, an examination of Caesar’s posthumous reputation and influence. She produces a huge list of European historians and poets, not to mention later generals or theorists of war, who she claims were influenced in one way or another by the great dictator but rattles through them at such high speed with barely a sentence about each that you learn nothing.

How much does it help you understand Caesar’s Gallic Wars to learn that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the deepest pit of hell next to Judas Iscariot? Not a whit. This kind of thing should either be done properly or not at all.

In summary Carolyn Hammond’s introduction so put me off her ability to think, instruct or write plain English that I hesitated to even begin her translation.

On the plus side, the OUP edition has one big map of ancient Gaul and five other maps of regions or specific battles, scattered through the text as needed; a 3-page timeline; a 15-page glossary of names; and 21 pages of notes, three times the number in the Penguin edition.

The Penguin edition (1951)

Unlike the OUP edition, the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition (titled The Conquest of Gaul) offers a crisp, useful summary of the subject:

Between 58 and 50 BC Julius Caesar conquered most of modern France, Belgium and Switzerland along with parts of Holland and Germany and invaded Britain, twice.
Caesar’s texts are an invaluable source for these events.
Caesar’s texts are the only narratives written by any military leader from the ancient world about his own campaigns.
Caesar’s writings were not disinterested academic histories but part of Caesar’s ongoing campaign for power, designed to promote his achievements and forward his political career with his peers and the Roman people.

Good. Feels like we are among adults. As to the extras, this edition also has a big map of Gaul, plus one of southern Britain and a useful one of the crucial siege of Alesia. It has a 17-page glossary, 8 pages of notes (far fewer than the OUP), but on the plus side, a useful 3-page appendix on the Roman army of Caesar’s day.

The Penguin translation was made by Stanley Alexander Handford (born in 1898) and first published in 1951. It was revised and given a new introduction by Jane Gardner in 1982. It would be a relief to report that it is a model of lucidity but the introduction, alas, also reveals an odd way with the English language. For example:

Political necessity, rather than military or than his personal irreplaceability in command, required that he continue in post.

That adjective, ‘military’, in normal English would require a noun after it. I fully understand that it refers back to the noun ‘necessity’ and can, after a moment’s confusion, be understood that way. But it would be clearer to use a synonym such as ‘need’ or maybe just write ‘Political rather than military necessity…’ And the second ‘than’? Delete it. And then ‘continue’? I understand that this is a subjunctive following the conditional preposition ‘that’ so that it is technically correct. But it is not, nowadays, standard English. We’d probably just say ‘continued’ or make it crystal clear with ‘should continue’:

Political necessity rather than military need or his personal irreplaceability in command required that he continued in his post.

The point is that all three of these dubious elements reflect Latin rather than modern English usage. Instead of spelling out the precise relationships between parts of speech it leaves some implicit in ways which are technically correct but strongly influenced by the highly inflected nature of Latin in which grammatical relationships are shown by changes within words rather than prepositions or word order.

In fact this make the third book in a row I’ve read (A.J. Woodman’s Sallust, Carolyn Hammond’s Gallic War, S.A. Handford’s Conquest of Gaul) in which the English translators struggled in the introduction to write in plain English – before I’d even started reading the translation. Instead all three betray an addiction to Latinate ways of thinking, Latinate ways of forming sentences, and to odd, unenglish phraseology.

Anyway, Gardner’s introduction (once you acclimatise to her occasional Latinate phraseology) is much better than Hammond’s directionless ramble – it is direct, straightforward, factual and clear. She establishes the basic fact that Caesar spent 9 years away from Rome, campaigning in Gaul.

The Roman constitution

She has a good stab at explaining the complicated Roman constitution. Theoretically, legislative and electoral sovereignty was vested in popular assemblies. In practice the state was dominated by the Senate which consisted of 300 or so men who had held any of the four ‘magistracies’ (aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul) which were elected for one-year posts These posts were arranged in the so-called cursus honorem. There were quite a few other posts such as censor or pontifex maximus, and elections to other priesthoods, such as the College of Augurs. Surprisingly, the Senate could not propose legislation: this was proposed (and vetoed) by the ten or so tribunes of the people elected every year.

Marius

Then Gardner recaps the military and political background to Caesar’s career: Caius Marius saved Rome from invasion by Germanic tribes around 100 BC but at the cost of holding seven successive consulships and developing a close relationship with his army which looked to him to provide money and land for veterans. I.e. he created the template for the Strong General which was to bedevil Roman politics for the next 70 years.

After a decade of political disturbance (the 80s) Lucius Cornelius Sulla seized power (82 to 78 BC) and implemented reforms designed to prevent the rise of another strong man.

Pompey and Crassus

But just eight years later most of Sulla’s reforms had been cancelled, mostly in the people’s enthusiasm to award the boy wonder general Gnaeus Pompeius extraordinary powers to prosecute wars against a) the pirates who bedevilled Rome’s overseas trade (67) and b) against King Mithridates of Pontus who was terrorising Asia Minor (66).

Back in Rome, ambitious young Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) attached himself to the richest man in Rome, Marcus Crassus, and they were both associated with an attempt to set up a hugely powerful land reform commission (ultimately rejected).

Their names were also mentioned in connection with the notorious conspiracy by Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the state (the Cataline conspiracy which Hammond refers to in one half-sentence, quoted above) although nothing, in the end, was conclusively proved.

In 62 Pompey returned from the East and, despite everyone’s fears that he might use his loyal army and widespread popularity to mount a coup in the style of Sulla, he disbanded his army and returned to civilian life. He was unhappy, though, to discover that this weakened his power in the state and that his requests to have land granted to his veterans kept being delayed. Meanwhile Marcus Crassus was having various business ventures blocked. And when Caesar returned in 60 BC from service as governor of Further Spain and wanted to be awarded a triumph, this wish also was blocked by the Senate.

The first triumvirate

So the three men, each in their separate ways stymied by the Establishment, came to a shady, behind-the-scenes agreement to advance each other’s ambitions. Pompey got his land reform, Crassus got his business ventures approved, and Caesar got himself elected consul for 59 BC and secured legislation appointing him governor of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Illyricum (the east coast of the Adriatic Sea). He then bribed one of the ten tribunes of the plebs to propose a law giving him governorship of Transalpine Gaul, the Roman province along the south coast of France. Both posts started in 58 BC and were to be held for an unprecedented five years, ending on 1 March 54.

This is where the narrative of the Gallic War commences, with Caesar arriving to take up command of his provinces.

Back in Rome

Gardner doesn’t stop there but goes on to describe the political shenanigans in Rome following Caesar’s departure for Gaul. After just one year his political opponents began lobbying for him to be relieved of his command and return to Rome as governors traditionally ought to. But if he did this, Caesar knew he would almost certainly face prosecution by his political enemies. He continued in his command until 56, when the political crisis intensified.

Luca

So he organised a meeting in the summer of that year in Luca, in north Italy (in his governorship of Cisalpine Gaul), attended by Pompey and Crassus and a third of the Senate, at which they recommitted to their pact. As a result:

Caesar’s rule in Gaul was renewed for a further five years.
Crassus and Pompey arranged for themselves to be elected consults in 55 BC and then…
for Pompey to be awarded governorship of Spain which he would, however, administer in absentia while remaining in Rome,
and for Crassus to be given command of an army to be sent to Parthia out East in 54.

Clodius and Milo

Meanwhile, escalating street violence between political gangs led by Titus Annius Milo and Publius Clodius Pulcher led to a breakdown of public order and in 52 BC the senate appointed Pompey sole consul in order to bring peace to the streets.

Should Caesar give up his command?

Gardner then gives a day by day account of the complicated manoeuvres around attempts by his enemies to get Caesar to relinquish his command and return to Rome a private citizen – and by Caesar and his supporters to try to get him elected as a consul, in his absence. The aim of this was so that Caesar could transition seamlessly from military governor to consul, which would guarantee he’d be exempt from prosecution for his alleged misdemeanours in Gaul.

It was this issue – whether he would lay down his governorship of Gaul and whether he would be allowed to stand for consul in his absence – which led to complex manoeuvring, proposal and counter-proposal in the Senate and the failure of which, finally, convinced Caesar that he would only be safe if he returned to Italy with his army.

Crossing the Rubicon

When he crossed the river Rubicon which divided Cisalpine Gaul (which he legitimately ruled) into Italy (where his presence with an army was illegal and a threat to the state) Caesar triggered the civil war with Pompey who, whatever his personal feelings, now found himself the representative of the Senate and the constitution. But this latter part of the story is dealt with in the book by Caesar now known as The Civil War and so it is here that Gardner ends her summary of events.

Gaul and its inhabitants

As with the Hammond edition, I wondered why Gardner was going into so much detail about events in Rome which we can read about elsewhere, but her summary of Roman politics only takes 6 pages before she goes on to write about the actual Gauls:

Rome already controlled the South of France whose major city was the port of Massilia (modern Marseilles), founded by the Greeks around BC. Over the 9 years of his command Caesar was to extend Roman control to all of France, southern Holland, Belgium, Germany west of the Rhine and most of Switzerland.

Caesar grouped the inhabitants of this huge area into three tribal groupings. This was an over-simplification but modern scholars still debate the complex ethnic, cultural and political relationships between the many tribes he mentions in his account. Ethnic and cultural similarities connected peoples living across a huge area of north-west Europe, from Britain to the borders of modern Turkey, but to the Greeks and Romans they were all ‘Gauls’ or ‘Celts’, terms they used interchangeably.

The whole of northern Europe was characterised be ceaseless migrations which had been going on since at least the 4th century BC, when one tribe penetrated deep enough into Italy to sack Rome in 390 BC, an event which left a lasting stain on the Roman psyche and an enduring paranoia about the ‘Gaulish threat’.

This fear had been revived at the end of the 2nd century, from 110 to 100 BC, when the two tribes of the Cimbri and the Teutoni threatened to invade north Italy. It was in order to defeat these enemies that the general Caius Marius was awarded the consulship for an unprecedented run and whose ultimate defeat of the threat made him a popular hero.

As Caesar took up his command at the start of 58 BC some tribes, the Helvetii and the Suebi, were once again on the move, threatening their neighbours and destabilising the Roman province. This was the justification Caesar used for taking aggressive military action against them.

Gardner’s introduction goes on to describe Gaulish culture, the existence of towns and trade, their fondness for Mediterranean wine (France didn’t yet cultivate grapes), their coins and art, the fact that some tribes had evolved beyond kings to elected magistrates and so on. Doubtless this would be dealt with more thoroughly in a more up-to-date history.

Last point to make is that Caesar consistently denigrates the Gaulish character. According to him the Gauls are impulsive, emotional, easily swayed, love change for its own sake, credulous, prone to panic, scatter brained and so on. Caesar links the Gauls’ instability of character to the instability of their tribal politics, where leaders routinely feud among themselves, assassinate each other and so on. (This often seems a bit rich coming from Caesar who was himself subject of the most famous assassination in history, representing a state which was about to collapse into a succession of civil wars.)

Gardner makes the simple point that what amounts to what we nowadays might call a ‘racist’ stereotyping of an entire people is deployed in an all-too-familiar tactic to justify conquering and ‘liberating’ i.e. subjugating them.

The Gallic Wars is a propaganda document: it is a set of commentaries, one for each of the eight campaigning years Caesar was in Gaul which a) justify his military conquests b) promoted his reputation as a spectacularly successful general. Each of the eight books might as well end with the same sentence: “So that’s why you ought to give me a triumph.”

His comments and reflections on Gaul and the Gauls or individual tribes or leaders sometimes strike the reader as reasonably objective and factual. But the fundamentally polemical, propaganda motive is never absent.

Which edition?

I started off reading the OUP edition because it was new and clean, the maps were embedded where they were needed in the text and Hammond’s translation, as far as I could tell, didn’t show any of the oddities of style all-too-apparent when she tries to write in her own name. About a third of the way in I swapped to the Penguin edition for no reason I can put my finger on except its prose style, and the physical object itself, felt older and cosier.

The decline in academic writing for a general audience

Older academics (from the 1950s and 60s) tended to have a broader range of life experience, vocabulary and phrasing. More recent academics, from the 1980s and 90s onwards, tend to have lived narrower academic lives and their use of English is marred by ideas and terms taken from sociology, critical theory and the inevitable woke obsessions (gender and race) which make their prose narrow, cold and technocratic.

Born in 1934, Gardner writes prose which is clear, factual, to the point and more sympatico than Hammond, born a generation later, whose prose is clunky, cluttered and confused, and whose sensitive virtue signalling (war is ‘distasteful, even immoral’) comes over as patronising.

There’s a study to be done about the decline in academic writing for a wide audience, the decline in academics’ ability to reach out and connect with a broader public. Immediately after the war, Allen Lane’s creation of the cheap paperback Penguin Classics was designed to bring the best literature from round the world, and from all of history, to the widest possible audience, accompanied by introductions by experts designed to widen their appeal.

By the turn of the 21st century many of the introductions to classic literature which I regularly read spend more time scolding the reader (or their authors) for not having the correct attitudes to race and gender which are absolutely required on their campuses and in their faculties, than explaining the world of the author and their text.

It gets boring being told off or patronised all the time. So I preferred the old Penguin edition and Jane Gardner’s intelligent, useful and unpatronising introduction. And she’s funny. Right at the end of her introduction she explains:

The glossary has been completely redone and now contains more than twice as many items as the original. There are a few additional notes and also a few changes to some of Handford’s more tendentious judgements. The editor has also seized the opportunity, in writing a new introduction, of being tendentious herself. (page 26)

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by Simon on June 3, 2022 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on June 3, 2022

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The Life of Julius Caesar by Plutarch

Rex’s reservations

The translator of the Penguin edition of Plutarch’s Roman biographies, Rex Warner, offers little one-page introductions before every life.

In this one he points out that, as in the Life of Gnaeus Pompey, Plutarch gives little sense of the fraught and violent politics 60s and 50s BC Rome, nor conveys the issue of street violence and anarchy in pre-war Rome. Also, he is an anti-Caesarian with the result that many of his comments springing from an underlying assumption that Julius planned right from the start of his career to overthrow the constitution.

Caesar’s plan had been laid down from the very beginning. (28)

This leads Plutarch to undervalue the contingency of Julius’s actions. Sure, he was very ambitious, ran up huge debts in order to scale political heights, but up till 60 BC Caesar did nothing which was outside the norms of the constitution. Attributing some deep, fully-worked-out conspiracy to Julius also underplays the way he initially hitched his star to Pompey, by far the more important and impressive figure in the 60s.

Warner ends with a pregnant thought. Plutarch’s simple-minded assumptions that Julius always aimed at one-man rule or monarchy means he neglects discussion of what reforms Julius had in mind to preserve the Republic.

Then again, Warner adds, in his own voice, Julius’s oft-expressed wish, that once peace had been restored in Rome, he would set out to engage the Parthian Empire in the East strongly indicates that Caesar himself had no answer to the political and constitutional problems besetting Rome.

The Life of Caesar

it’s not the longest life of Plutarch’s lives, at 69 ‘chapters’. It starts very abruptly when Lucius Cornelius Sulla seized power in Rome and tried to force Caesar to divorce his wife, Cornelia, because she was the daughter of Sulla’s enemy, Lucius Cornelius Cinna.

This happened in 82 BC when Caesar was, obviously enough, old enough to have been married (the traditional year of his birth is 100 BC so he’d have been 18). Therefore most commentators think the early part of the Life, which would have dealt with his family and boyhood and young manhood before this even, must be missing.

(1) When the text does get going it accurately describes Caesar as the nephew of Sulla’s enemy, Gaius Marius, the saviour of Rome from barbarian invasion at the turn of the century and the man responsible for a root and branch of the Roman army. Julius’s mother’s sister, Julia, had been married to Marius with the result that the old general became, apparently, a kind of father figure or hero to the boy.

When Julius obstinately refuse to divorce his wife at Sulla’s behest, he was forced to go into hiding, in the country of the Sabines, before taking ship for the East to hide out with King Nicomedes in Bithynia. [This account is obviously garbled because we know from other sources that Julius was officially serving under Marcus Thermus, praetor of Asia, 81 to 80 BC, when he was given formal instructions to go to Bithynia to raise a fleet to assist in the siege of Mitylene.]

(2) The kidnap by pirates Plutarch says Julius was captured by pirates near the island Pharmacusa. He was kept captive for 38 day and nonchalantly took part in their sports and games. He wrote poems and speeches and read them to the pirates who didn’t understand them so he called them barbarians and they laughed at his cockiness, as well as when he promised to have them all hanged.

When he was finally released on payment of a ransom by his family, Caesar bought ships, went back to their location and captured them all, taking them to prison in Pergamum. When he went to the praetor governing Asia to seek justice, the latter indicated he fancied their money i.e. would ransom them and set hem free – so Julius went back to the prison and, on his own authority, had them all crucified.

(3) Legend has it that, as Sulla’s power waned, and it became safe for Julius to return to Rome, he stopped off at Rhodes to study under Apollonius the son of Molon, the illustrious rhetorician with the reputation of a worthy character. Cicero was another of his pupils. Julius studied hard and reached the second rank but was content to go no further, preferring to focus on a career as a statesman and general.

(4) In 77 BC i.e. after Sulla’s death in 78, Julius impeached Dolabella for maladministration of his province. Having read a fair number of these texts by now, I’m getting the sense that Roman governors taking bribes, extorting money, imposing extortionate taxes and generally behaving very badly in their governorships was the norm. Anyway, Julius was a successful advocate and won popularity by espousing the popular or populares cause (as had his hero Marius) against the aristocratic optimates. Plutarch drops in the thought that Cicero suspected from the first Julius’s revolutionary intentions.

(5) In 68 BC Julius delivered a splendid encomium on his dead aunt. He won popular applause for the risk step of including image of her dead husband Marius in her funeral procession, as these had been banned under Sulla. Also in 68 his first wife died, and he delivered a funeral oration for her. In 67 he went to Spain as quaestor under Vetus. On his return he married a third wife, Pompeia. He continually spent huge sums of money, when he was curator of the Appian Way restoring it, and when he was elected aedile in 66 eclipsing all his predecessors with expenditure on theatrical performances, processions and public banquets.

(6) Julius hatched a plan to commission numerous busts and memorials to Marius and had them erected on the Capitol one night so the population woke up the next morning to find them everywhere. This was generally popular and revealed the hidden strength of the Marian party. In the Senate the leader of the optimates, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, accused him of undermining the government; but even here his action was broadly approved, and won him more popularity.

(7) In 63 the position of pontifex maximus or chief priest became vacant and Julius campaigned hard for it, against older more notable men. On the day of the vote, as he left his house he told his mother he would either return as high priest or go into exile. [I’ve seen this anecdote repeated in at least modern history books.] He was elected and now a solid cohort of enemies began to fear his rising power and popularity.

The end of 63, November and December, saw the Catiline conspiracy (described at length in my reviews of Plutarch’s life of Cicero and Sallust’s history). Julius played a notable role in the Senate debate about what to do with the conspirators Cicero had caught red-handed. When everyone else was clamouring for their execution, Julius persuasively argued their lives be spared and they be sent under house arrest to safe houses around Italy.

(8) Julius’s speech was very powerful, as we can tell from Sallust’s reconstruction of it, and swayed men who’d previously expressed the opposite view. But it was then solidly opposed by Marcus Porcius Cato and Catulus and the conspirators were led away and promptly garroted.

Plutarch adds the graphic detail that, as Caesar exited the Senate house after the debate, many of the young men who at that time formed a bodyguard for Cicero ran with drawn swords to threaten him, then turned to Cicero for guidance and, when Cicero shook his head, desisted – a vivid example of the way civic life in Rome had descended into the thuggery of armed gangs.

But then, rather rather than condemn this action, Plutarch goes on to criticise Cicero for missing an opportunity to kill Caesar and accuses him of being scared of the people. All of the political leaders were scared, because when the Senate held a debate a few days later which went on longer than usual, a mob gathered outside and called for their hero, threatening to burn the place down if he wouldn’t come out.

It’s not this or that incident which impresses the reader, it’s the sense that late Republican Roman political life was so fraught, that there was so much tension and paranoia.

(9) Introduces us to Publius Clodius Pulcher, the wealthy scoundrel who fancied Julius’s new wife. Plutarch gives the oft-quoted anecdote that Clodius chose to dress up as a woman in order to infiltrate the women-only rites of the goddess Bona which are held once a year in the house of the praetor. Caesar held this position at the time and so, on the night in question, he and all the males had left the house, and it was filled with women celebrating the festival.

(10) And Clodius dressed up as a woman, was let into the house by a maid in on the secret and went looking for Pompeia. But he was caught out by another serving woman who told all the aristocratic women who promptly searched the house, found Clodius hiding and threw him out. Then went home and told all their influential husbands, demanding justice for the goddess and the city.

A tribune indicted Clodius who was brought to trial but the jurors were intimidated by the people who lobbied in his favour. Meanwhile, Julius immediately divorced his wife. When summoned to appear at Clodius’s trial he was asked why he’d done this if he trusted her and he made the famous reply that ‘Caesar’s wife ought to be above suspicion’. Clodius was acquitted by the jurors who spoiled their voting papers.

(11) At the start of 61 Caesar went to Spain to serve as praetor but was only allowed to go after he had paid off at least some of his creditors. He had racked up huge debts and so went to the richest man in Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus, who agreed to pay them off in return for help with his political projects. It was the start of the informal behind-the-scenes arrangement which, when it added Pompey, became known as the Triumvirate.

Plutarch gives the anecdote about Caesar reading a life of Alexander the Great then bursting into tears. When his friends ask why he replies, ‘Is it not tragic that Alexander had conquered a world of kings and I, at his age [33], have achieved nothing?’

(12) In Spain Caesar conquered tribes and administered justice fairly, in particular restoring fair relations between debtors and creditors. Though he also made a fortune through the usual channels. That’s it on Spain. Skimpy.

(13) On returning to Rome Caesar wanted a triumph but also wanted to stand as consul; the problem was that a general awaiting award of a triumph had to stay outside the city bounds while a man seeking election as a consul had to be inside the city, canvassing. So he asked friends to pass a law saying he could campaign in absentia i.e. staying outside the city waiting for his triumph while his friends campaigned for him. But this was vetoed by Cato the Younger who had found his vocation by opposing anything Caesar wanted. So Caesar abandoned the triumph, entered the city and got himself elected consul (in mid 60 BC). It was now that he negotiated the deal between Crassus and Pompey who had been rivals, to create what later became known as the First Triumvirate.

Plutarch makes it clear he’s one of those who believes this event and this date, 60 BC, to be the pivotal one in the road to civil war, because, without people realising it, they ‘changed the form of government’. Frustratingly, Plutarch doesn’t go into details or explain what he means by that. He’s not a theory guy. He’s a personal anecdote, superstition-loving sentimental guy.

(14) When Caesar took up his consulship at the start of 59, he brought forward laws appropriate for ‘a revolutionary tribune of the people’ i.e. land redistribution. Rebuffed by the optimates in the Senate he went before the popular assembly, flanked by Crassus and Pompey, and was acclaimed for his proposals.

Caesar wed his daughter Julia to Pompey. Then he married Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus’s daughter, Calpurnia, and got Piso made consul for the following year. Cato railed against this use of marriage alliances to bypass the forms of the constitution, complaining that:

it was intolerable to have the supreme power prostituted by marriage alliances and to see men helping one another to powers and armies and provinces by means of women.

When Caesar’s fellow consul tried to oppose his plans his life was threatened so he locked himself up in his house and daren’t go to the Forum. Pompey filled the Forum with soldiers to force Caesar’s laws through, then got Caesar awarded governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum and Transalpine Gaul. (As I know from other sources it was a bit more complicated than that, but Plutarch doesn’t do the complex aspects of events; he is interested in broad-brush, moral points).

So he points out that Caesar was instrumental in getting Cato arrested, in getting the notorious Clodius elected tribune who promptly raised a faction to get Cicero driven out of Italy (Cicero thought it wise to flee in March 58). All this is much more complex than Plutarch’s quick glosses of these events.

(15) Then Plutarch massively changes tack, by commencing to describe Caesar’s career in Gaul and pronouncing him one of the greatest generals of all time. This was because of:

the difficulty of the country he fought in
the extent of his conquests
the number and strength of enemy forces he defeated
the savage treacherous nature of the barbarian tribes whose goodwill he won
the reasonable and humane way he treated prisoners
gifts and acts of kindness to his soldiers
fought more battles and killed more of the enemy than any other Roman general

Plutarch gives the wild figures that Caesar took 800 cities by storm, subdued 300 nations, killed one million in battle and took one million prisoners. (In the Life of Pompey chapter 67, Plutarch repeats these figures but says it was 1,000 cities. Maybe these figures are just easy to remember. Maybe they don’t bear any relation to reality but are just lazy statistics.)

(16) Characteristically, rather than analysis, Plutarch gives some tall tales of some random acts of heroism Caesar inspired in some of his men.

(17) Caesar won his men’s admiration and trust by 1. the free and open way he distributed honours and largesse, making it clear he wasn’t keeping it for himself 2. by showing over and over there was no form of danger or hard work he was unwilling to undergo himself.

Plutarch says Caesar was ‘a slightly built man, had a soft white skin, and was subject to headaches and epileptic fits’. He makes a very interesting point: that everywhere he went he was accompanied by a slave who was trained to write from dictation. And that in Gaul he made it a habit to dictate letters to secretaries while all of them were riding on horseback. Is that how he wrote (dictated) his commentaries on the Gallic and Civil wars?

(18) Plutarch summarises Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul i.e. against the migrating Helvetii, crossing the Rhine into Germany to fight Ariovistus (19). Plutarch’s account is like a very brief summary of Caesar’s own Gallic Wars, but with additional details thrown in. Caesar tells us the Germans delayed fighting because their holy women said they should wait till the new moon, but Plutarch adds the detail that the holy women could foretell the future by studying the whirls and eddies in river water and the sound they made. And so Caesar attacked and massacred the tribe of Ariovistus, king of the Suebi.

(20) In the winter of 58/57 Caesar put his troops in winter quarters and returned to Cisalpine Gaul where he spent the winter politicking, receiving political guests, giving them gifts, promising them more. In Plutarch’s view Caesar was taking money from conquered Gauls in order to buy and bribe Romans. Brief though it is, this is a useful insight because Caesar’s own account obviously paints him as punctiliously performing his duty, so Plutarch sheds a whole new light on his activities.

Back to the fighting: Plutarch gives a quick summary of Caesar’s campaigns against the Belgae in the far north who he massacred so much that lakes and deep rivers filled up with bodies. (This, I think, shades into the taste for the extreme and the grotesque which we’ve seen in other Plutarch lives.)

Then a quick paragraph summarising the campaign against the Nervii focusing on the climactic battle which was going against the Romans till Caesar seized a shield and plunged into the thick of the fight, prompting the tenth legion to come to his aid. Result: some 60,000 Nervii dead.

(21) The Senate declared 15 days of public rejoicing. The winter of 57/6 Caesar again spent in north Italy, giving money to clients to buy elections to positions where they could support him. He organised the conference at Luca where the Triumvirate was renewed with a third of the Senate and umpteen other magistrates present. In effect. Caesar, Pompey and Crassus were running the state for their own benefit. They stitched up a deal whereby Pompey and Crassus would be consuls for the following year (55) while Caesar had his command in Gaul renewed for another five years. They had got their fiercest critic, Cato, out of the way, by having him posted as governor of Cyprus in 58.

(22) 55 BC. Brief summary of Caesar’s campaign against the Usipes and Tenteritae who had crossed the Rhine and were rampaging through Gaulish territory. They broke a promise, attacked and massacred his cavalry, so next time they send a deputation Caesar arrested it. As a result his implacable enemy Cato, now returned to Rome after his year in Cyprus, called for Caesar to be handed over to the Germans for oath-breaking. Another jaw-breaking figure: 400,000 Germans are said to have been killed. Caesar built a bridge over the Rhine in a record-breaking 10 days.

(23) Caesar took his legions across the Rhine. The Germans ran away and hid in the forests. Caesar ravaged far and wide. (Plutarch doesn’t mention this but Caesar wanted to take the fight into Germany and intimidate them against invading Gaul again). He ravaged far and wide for 18 days then withdrew his army and dismantled the bridge.

Plutarch gives a very superficial one-paragraph account of Caesar’s two expeditions into Britain (55 and 54 BC). What he adds to Caesar’s account is the fact that Britain was a legendary land and some contemporaries thought it didn’t even exist. In Plutarch’s view he found the inhabitants poor and wretched with nothing worth stealing, whereas Caesar gives an infinitely more detailed account, explaining the many trade links between north Gaul and Britain which exported, among other things, tin, furs and slaves to the continent. Slaves.

(The more you read about the ancient world, the more you get used to the idea that slavery was universal, a universal trade, a universal consequence of the unending wars, the basis of much of the economy [in mines and huge agricultural estates] reaching right into the most intimate spaces and relationships in domestic households [as per the playwrights Plautus and Terence]).

Back in Gaul Caesar received letters from friends telling him his daughter Julia, Pompey’s wife, had died in childbirth in August 54. Many contemporaries immediately worried about what would happen now this important tie between Caesar and Pompey had been severed.

(24) In the winter of 54/53 the whole of Gaul broke out in revolt. Very briefly Plutarch describes how the rebel army under Ambiorix (he calls him Abriorix) massacred the entire army of Caesar’s legates, Quintus Titurius Sabinus and Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta. There followed the prolonged siege of the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero, the orator’s younger brother who was serving as a staff officer with Caesar’s army.

Plutarch describes how Caesar marched to his aid with a force much smaller than the attackers, lured them away from the siege, built a camp, feigned weakness and fear till the Gauls attacked in their usual haphazard fashion – at which point the Romans sortied out of the camp and defeated them.

(25) Pompey lent him two of his Italian legions and Caesar travelled around the country deploying cohorts and commanders at key locations. All this was leading up to the outbreak of the greatest rebellion of all, in 52 BC, led by Vercingetorix.

(26) Plutarch gives a superficial account of the various tribes which joined Vercingetorix’s revolt and of Caesar’s marching his army through various territories, leading up to a victorious battle.

(27) Vercingetorix retreated to the stronghold of his people at Alesia. Caesar besieged it. But then all the other Gaullish tribes rallied and sent an enormous force against him of 250,000. So Caesar had to build a double row of fortifications, one set facing in, the other facing out.

Very superficially Plutarch describes Caesar’s victory over a) the attackers who melt away, and then b) the eventual surrender of the besieged town. Plutarch doesn’t give any details of the siege but devotes a paragraph to painting the scene of the defeated Vercingetorix riding a horse up to Caesar sitting in his commander’s chair, slowly riding round him, dismounting, stripping off his armour and sitting humbly at Caesar’s feet. Who cares whether this happened or not – it is like a sumptuous Victorian history painting and Plutarch is more of a painter than a historian.

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar, September 52 BC, by Lionel Noel Roger (1899) Note the impressive Roman siege tower looming over the smoking ruins of Alesia at top left.

(28) Plutarch gives a rather simple-minded summary of the political situation. When Crassus killed in faraway Parthia in 53, the triumvirate became a duumvirate and the rivalry between Caesar and Pompey to be top dog came out into the open. Plutarch claims that Pompey initially thought Caesar was a toy dependent on him, and only came to fear him too late.

Meanwhile politics in Rome had declined into chaos. Voters were routinely and openly bribed and the venues for voting often ended up covered in blood and bodies. (Oddly, Plutarch nowhere mentions the notorious street gangs of the rivals Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo which dominate modern accounts of the period).

Intelligent people were already thinking the Republic could no longer function which is why Cato (of all people) made the desperate suggestion that Pompey be made sole consul for a year (52 BC). So Plutarch appears to contradict his own earlier statement about the triumvirate overthrowing the existing order, with this passage demonstrating that the existing order was collapsing from within. The only question was who would step in to run things.

Pompey had his governorship over Spain extended. He had never actually gone to Spain but ruled it through legates while remaining in Italy with four legions at his command. In the days of the Triumvirate this was so he could protect his partners’ interests. Now that Crassus was dead, to Caesar and everyone else it took on a different complexion and looked like Pompey wanted to make himself top dog in Italy.

(29) Caesar asked the Senate for permission to be allowed to stand for a consulship and to have his command in Gaul extended.

Plutarch adds detailed anecdotes to Caesar’s complaints that he had many enemies suggesting that he really did. These included the two consuls, Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus who, for example, had the inhabitants of Novum Comum, a colony recently established by Caesar in Gaul, deprived of their citizenship. Marcellus had a deputation from Novum Comum beaten with rods and told they weren’t real Romans and told to go back to Gaul and show Caesar their wounds.

These kinds of stories, along with the Clodius-Milo street gangs, the bribery, and the casual violence in the Forum, around the Senate, build up a picture of a state which really needed to be taken in hand and sorted out.

Meanwhile, Caesar used the wealth he’d gained in Gaul to win important supporters and to build striking monuments such as the Basilica Pauli Aemilii in the centre of Rome. Pompey was now alarmed at his power and so supported moves to have Caesar replaced in Gaul. He had tribunes pass a law sending more legions to Syria and asked Caesar to return the legion he’d loaned him a few years before i.e. Caesar lost 2 legions, Pompey none. It wasn’t paranoid of Caesar to see a conspiracy against him in all these actions.

Plutarch adds the interesting detail that these returning legions spread false rumours that Caesar was unpopular with his troops. This encouraged a false sense of security in Pompey, a confidence that he could not only rustle up troops in Italy whenever he wanted but that if Caesar’s troops returned they would all defect to him. This was a catastrophically wrong assumption. Stuck in Rome among politicians, he believed that resolutions passed in the Senate or people’s assemblies meant something, gave him strength when, of course, they were just hot air compared to Caesar’s battle-hardened army.

(30) Yet Caesar’s demands seemed reasonable enough. He suggested both he and Pompey surrendered their commands and put things to a vote of the Senate and people. Curio read out this proposal to the Senate and was applauded. Marcus Antonius (who I’ll refer to by his familiar English name of Mark Antony) was serving as a tribune of the plebs and reads a letter of the same effect to that assembly.

Yet the optimates in the Senate rejected the proposal and Pompey’s father-in-law, the phenomenally aristocratic Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica, counter-proposed that Caesar be declared a public enemy if he did not lay down his command by a specified date, while Pompey would not have to do the same. It was this political impasse which meant there could only be a military solution.

(31) Caesar makes a milder proposal that he give up Transalpine Gaul but maintain governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum and just two legions. Cicero was very active in shuttling from one group of supporters to another and Pompey was inclined to accept the figure of 6,000 soldiers left to Caesar. But this was opposed by the consul, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, who went out of his way to insult Antony and Curio, who he drove out of the Senate with threats of violence. This forced them to disguise themselves and escape Rome in carts.

[So you could argue that the civil war broke out and the Roman republic crashed to an end because Lentulus was an idiot. And Cato, too, who was just as intransigent. There are always people like them, determined to push their principles or their cause beyond the bonds of compromise or expediency required to make democracy work, triggering disasters far worse than anything they claim to be working to prevent.]

Plutarch brings out something which is obscure in Caesar’s account which is that by forcing Antony and Curio flee, Lentulus was depriving them of their right of veto and attacking their constitutional right as tribunes of the plebs. Caesar was to use this point repeatedly in the half dozen or so places where he states his case in the account he wrote of what ensured, The Civil War. Lentulus gifted Caesar a way of expanding the argument from being solely about Caesar’s dignity and rights into a broader one about attacks on the tribunes and the constitution. Idiot Lentulus gifted Caesar a propaganda coup.

(32) With the expulsion of Antony and the declaration of Caesar as a public enemy the political crisis had reached a climax. Plutarch explains how Caesar, realising that a sudden surprise move would be far more effective than some laboriously contrived campaign, decided to act quickly. He gives a characteristically dramatic account of the evening Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

He himself spent the day in public, attending and watching the exercises of gladiators; but a little before evening he bathed and dressed and went into the banqueting hall. Here he held brief converse with those who had been invited to supper, and just as it was getting dark and went away, after addressing courteously most of his guests and bidding them await his return. To a few of his friends, however, he had previously given directions to follow him, not all by the same route, but some by one way and some by another. He himself mounted one of his hired carts and drove at first along another road, then turned towards Ariminum. When he came to the river which separates Cisalpine Gaul from the rest of Italy (it is called the Rubicon), and began to reflect, now that he drew nearer to the fearful step and was agitated by the magnitude of his ventures, he checked his speed. Then, halting in his course, he communed with himself a long time in silence as his resolution wavered back and forth, and his purpose then suffered change after change. For a long time, too, he discussed his perplexities with his friends who were present, among whom was Asinius Pollio, estimating the great evils for all mankind which would follow their passage of the river, and the wide fame of it which they would leave to posterity. But finally, with a sort of passion, as if abandoning calculation and casting himself upon the future, and uttering the phrase with which men usually prelude their plunge into desperate and daring fortunes, “Let the die be cast,” he hastened to cross the river; and going at full speed now for the rest of the time, before daybreak he dashed into Ariminum and took possession of it.

Great dramatic moment.

(33) Total panic in Rome, among the population and the politicians. Lentulus was roundly criticised by all sides for what his intemperate action had triggered. Once, in a speech to the Senate, Pompey had boasted that all he had to do was stamp his feet and armies would rally to his call. So the senator Favonius shouted at him to stamp his feet now.

In fact Pompey commanded at least 2 legions while Caesar only had one (though he had sent messages to Gaul for the legions there to join him). Pompey might have defeated Caesar if he had marched to confront him straightaway. Instead he let himself be carried away in the panic of the time, declared a state of anarchy and left the city, along with his legions, advising the Senate to follow him.

In Cicero’s letters we read how this single fateful decision lost Pompey huge amounts of goodwill and trust at a stroke.

(34) Plutarch describes how the consuls and Senate abandoned Rome which became like a ship in a storm which has lost its helmsman. Caesar besieged Corfinium. Plutarch supplies a characteristically theatrical anecdote, telling us that the town’s commander, Domitius, took poison provided by his slave but, when he heard of Caesar’s policy of blanket forgiveness to beaten opponents, Domitius bewailed his decision – at which point his slave admitted it wasn’t poison he gave him after all, Domitius was delighted and went out to greet Caesar and hand over Corfinium.

(35) Plutarch very quickly describes how Caesar took other towns and added their garrisons to his. How he marched to confront Pompey who, however, fled to Brundisium on the south-east coast of Italy and took ship for Greece. Caesar, having no ships, could not follow so turned back to Rome, having conquered Italy in 60 day without bloodshed. [Plutarch makes no mention of the elaborate siege of Brundisium, which lasted over a week.]

Entering Rome Caesar addressed what remains of the Senate in calm and reasonable terms and asked them to send envoys to Pompey to negotiate peace, but they refused out of fear. Caesar broke into the state treasury despite the protests of its guardian, Metellus.

(36) Unable to cross the sea to Greece, Caesar secured his rear by marching his army round the coast to Spain, to take on the legions there which were loyal to their commander, Pompey. In two brisk sentences Plutarch gives a flying overview of Caesar’s campaign in Spain i.e. despite hardships he defeated the Pompeian generals Afranius and Varro. [Compare and contrast with the thorough account in Caesar’s own Civil War.]

(37) Back in Rome, Caesar adopted the extraordinary and ad hoc power of ‘dictator’ for just 11 days during which he passed important laws: bringing home exiles, restoring the civic rights of the children of those proscribed by Sulla (a continuation of his restoring the statues of Marius), lowering interest rates to relieve the burdens of the debtor class, and other public-spirited reforms. (According to a note from Warner, Plutarch is wrong, here; Caesar was made dictator while he was still in Massilia en route back to Rome, by a decision of the praetor Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.)

Caesar then resigned the dictatorship, had himself appointed consul and set out for Brundisium again.

He took ship to Greece and captured Oricum and Apollonia. Plutarch devotes a colourful paragraph to imagining the complaints of the legions who have marched all the way from Gaul, moaning about being taken for granted and used like tools.

(38) Plutarch then wastes an entire chapter describing an unlikely escapade in which Caesar decides he has to go back to Brundisium to collect his troops but does so by disguising himself as a slave aboard a merchant vessel which, in the event, is unable to make it from the mouth of the river into the open sea because of tides and wind. [Not very likely and not mentioned in any other source. Moments like this in Plutarch have the feel of fairy tale rather than history.]

(39) Antony arrived from Brundisium with reinforcements but Pompey was well situated and able to receive supplies by land and sea. The complete lack of detail about the campaign in Greece makes you wonder whether Plutarch even had Caesar’s own account as a source. Maybe he was just really bored and fast forwarding through the whole story.

Similarly he doesn’t explain anything about the vital defeat at the battle of Dyrrichium but uses it solely to give an impressionistic portrait of panic-stricken troops. In Plutarch’s account, after this defeat Caesar spent a sleepless night before deciding to leave Pompey by the sea and march inland to attack the army of his father-in-law Scipio (which was marching back from the east to help Pompey).

(40) This looks to Pompey’s people like flight, and rumours spread that Caesar’s men are tired out and starving and that a pestilence has broken out. For these reasons Pompey thought it best to let Caesar’s army wear itself out.

(41) But his squabbling advisers demanded action, and Plutarch singles out Favonius and Afranius who shame Pompey into fighting. Plutarch gives a scrappy half-hearted ‘explanation of how, having taken the town of Gomphi, Caesar was able to provision his army and the availability of wine suddenly cleared up the mystery illness they’d been suffering from.

(42) Both armies come into the plain of Pharsalus, like everyone who something bad is about to happen to, has a prophetic dream. Plutarch follows Caesar in mocking the absurd over-confidence of Pompey’s entourage of politicians. They were so confident of victory that they devoted their energies to squabbling over who would hold which high office when they returned to Rome as victors.

Domitius and [Publius Cornelius Lentulus] Spinther and Scipio disputed earnestly with one another over Caesar’s office of Pontifex Maximus, and many sent agents to Rome to hire and take possession of houses suitable for praetors and consuls, assuming that they would immediately hold these offices after the war.

They are bolstered by the disparity between the armies: Pompey’s 45,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry against Caesar’s 22,000 and 1,000.

(43) Plutarch describes the omens on Caesar’s side.

Caesar told his army that several legions were on their way to join them, and should they wait to share the glory of a great victory? To which they obviously shouted ‘No!’
Caesar made a sacrifice and the seers told him it signified a revolution in the current status quo.
The night before the battle a fiery torch was seen moving in the sky above their camp which then fell to earth into Pompey’s camp.

On 9 August 48 BC Caesar broke camp and prepared to march for Scotussa.

(44) He was interrupted by his scouts with the surprise news that Pompey had moved his army down into the plain and offered battle. Plutarch summarises the battle lineup of both sides. The anecdote about brave centurion Caius Crastinus.

(45) Plutarch captures the central fact about the Battle of Pharsalus, fought on 8 August 48 BC, which is that, seeing the size of Pompey’s cavalry on his right, Caesar drew a percentage of cohorts from all his other legions and lined them up to create a fourth line on his right.

All Roman armies traditionally fought with three lines of infantry. Caesar’s decision to create a fourth line meant that, as Pompey’s cavalry fought its way through Caesar’s cavalry on the right, it was suddenly surprised by highly motivated infantry which it didn’t expect to find there. Moreover, the infantry had been carefully instructed to thrust their javelins up into the faces of the cavalry who were mostly young men and vain of their looks.

Amazingly, this tactic produced confusion and then flight. With the cavalry in retreat, Caesar’s fourth line then swivelled to attack Pompey’s centre from the rear, which, as a result of the unexpected pressure, began to collapse.

But by this time Pompey had realised the battle was lost and had fled the battlefield at sight of his cavalry in confusion. He sat in his tent until told that the enemy were mounting the walls of his camp, at which point he changed into mufti, took horse and fled the camp through a rear gate.

Plutarch leaves Pompey at that point, telling the reader he will describe Pompey’s flight to Egypt and murder in his Life of Pompey, which he does very well and very movingly.

(46) Caesar was angry and upset when he entered Pompey’s camp. He exclaimed: ‘They made me do this.’ Many of the dead were servants. Most of the defeated soldiers Caesar incorporated into his own army. Caesar was delighted when Marcus Junius Brutus was found and delivered to him alive.

(47) Plutarch lists some of the omens and prophecies of Caesar’s victory. Plutarch devotes a fair amount of time to relishing superstitious signs and omens around all his great men.

(48) Caesar gave the Thessalanians (inhabitants of the broader region around Pharsalis) their freedom, then set off in pursuit of Pompey. He went to Asia where he made Cnidius a free city, and remitted a third of Asia’s taxes.

It was when he arrived in Alexandria that he was presented with the severed head of Pompey by officers of the young pharaoh, Ptolemy, and turned away in disgust. Then ha was given Pompey’s signet ring and wept over it. Presented with Pompey’s companions who accompanied him to the end, Caesar forgave them and accepted them into his side.

He spends more time describing Egyptian politics, well, the slimey character of king Ptolemy’s chamberlain Potheinus. The dead king, Ptolemy Auletes had been declared a ‘friend’ of Rome during Caesar’s consulship in 59 BC. To achieve this he had promised a king’s ransom and Caesar now intended to collect it from his son.

(49) Cleopatra sneaks into the palace wrapped in a sleeping bag carried by her loyal servant Apollodorus the Sicilian. She inveigles her way into Caesar’s affections. At a banquet Caesar’s servant learns that Potheinus and the Egyptian general Achillas are plotting to assassinate Caesar. Caesar has Potheinus killed but Achillas escapes and raises an army which prompts The Alexandrine War, difficult to fight because it is street fighting.

Again, very briefy, Plutarch mentions the Egyptian attempts to cut off the Romans’ water supply, then to cut off supplies by ship, so that Caesar set fire to the ships in the harbour. He moves on to the fight to secure control of the Pharos which controlled entrance to the Great Harbour. The king went over to Achillas, prompting Caesar to a full scale battle, which he won. Then he departed Egypt, leaving Cleopatra as queen. Nine months later she bore his son, Caesarion. It’s all told like that – very fast and superficial. Plutarch is in a real hurry. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he realised he couldn’t compete with Caesar’s own accounts of the Gallic Wars and the Civil War.

(50) Very quickly Plutarch describes Caesar marching against King Pharnaces II of Pontus (June 47 BC), who had driven out the Roman forces and was allying with all the princes and tetrarchs, and defeating him at the battle of Zela. In announcing the swiftness and fierceness of this battle to one of his friends at Rome, Amantius, Caesar wrote three words Veni, vidi, vici – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.

Caesar’s route from Alexandria to Pontus, 47 BC

(51) Caesar returned to Rome. He arranged to be made consul for the following year, 46. He became unpopular through a series of unfortunate events:

his soldiers had mutinied and killed two men of praetorian rank, Galba and Cosconius, but instead of court martialling them he had them demobbed, paid 1,000 drachmas and allotted land in Italy
the irresponsible behaviour of the deputy he’d left in Rome, Publius Cornelius Dolabella
the greed of Amantius
the drunkenness of Antony
Corfinius built over and refurnished the house of Pompey on the ground that it was not good enough for him

Caesar would have liked to have acted more firmly against these powerful reprobates, but he needed allies.

(52) Cato and Scipio had escaped to Africa where they’d allied with King Juba. Caesar sailed to Africa via Sicily. There were repeated engagements as Caesar was short of provisions. The Numidian cavalry were quick, Plutarch tells of one occasion when Caesar’s cavalry were dismounted and enjoying an entertainment by a dancer playing the flute when the Numidians attacked, killing many and only Caesar rushing out the camp with infantry saved the day. In another attack Caesar grabbed the standard bearer who was running away, turned him round and pointed him towards the battle.

(53) The Battle of Thapsus 6 April 46 BC. Scipio was feeling confident. Leaving Afranius and Juba in camps of their own he begins building a camp beyond a lake near the city of Thapsus. But while he was still building it Caesar’s army moved with incredible speed, emerging from nearby woods to overpower the soldiers and defeat them, then marching on to also take Afranius and Juba’s camps. In one day he defeated three armies and killed 50,000. Plutarch gives a characteristically anecdotal (and macabre) addition by saying that one tradition says Caesar began to have an epileptic fit as he deployed the forces and victory was overseen by subordinates.

(54) Caesar’s long-time enemy Marcus Porcius Cato was in charge of the city of Utica. Caesar marched there only to find Cato had committed suicide, which vexed him. Plutarch considers whether he would have shown him mercy, as he did Brutus, Cicero and other opponents. Caesar wrote a book called Anti-Cato which suggests not. Then again it was intended as a rebuttal of Cicero’s book in praise of Cato so…

(55) Caesar now returned to Rome where he held an unprecedented four triumphs, and put on lavish public feasts and processions. A census was taken which showed the number listed had dropped from 320,000 to 150,000 indication of the disruption caused by war. [According to Suetonius’s Life of Caesar, this was not a census of all the people, but a revision of the number of poorer citizens entitled to receive allowances of grain from the state.]

(56) Then Caesar set out for Spain to fight the sons of Pompey. [This war certainly drags on, doesn’t it?] It was resolved at the epic Battle of Munda 17 March 45 BC, where Caesar admitted he really had to fight and was nearly defeated. Of the two sons of Pompey the younger escaped, and the head of the elder was brought to Caesar. He held another triumph in Rome to mark this victory in October 45 but it displeased the people. It was one thing conquering other nations, quite another flaunting the killing of Romans.

(57) Caesar has himself declared dictator for life. Senators and tribunes sycophantically competed to lard him with extravagant titles, which further alienated the people. But Caesar impressed by his clemency and forgiveness. There were no proscriptions and blood baths as per Sulla 40 years earlier. Instead he forgave and promoted former enemies, for example, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus.

Pompey’s statues had been taken down but Caesar had them restored. His friends advised a bodyguard but Caesar insisted the affection of the people was the best protection. He distributed cheap grain and founded colonies for ex-soldiers, notably at the sites of ruined cities of Carthage and Corinth.

As sole rulers go he was, then, a singularly enlightened, fair and public spirited one.

(58) He won over the reluctant nobles (optimates) by promising consulships and praetorships. Plutarch dwells on Caesar’s immense ambition, his determination to outdo all other rulers and even himself. He planned to head east, conquer Parthia, then journey round the Black Sea conquering all the kingdoms, then return through Germany (conquering them) to Gaul, thus a tour of the empire. He planned to dig a canal through the isthmus of Corinth, reroute the Tiber, clear obstacles to shipping along the Italian coast. He was overflowing with plans for public works.

(59) He reformed the calendar.

(60) What made him generally unpopular was the rumour that he wanted to be made king. He denied it. When a crowd cried out Rex Rex, he said, ‘Non Rex sum sed Caesar’ – ‘I am not a king, I am Caesar’ (with a play on the fact that Rex was, improbably enough, a proper name in Rome).

There was the story that the whole Senate traipsed up to him as he sat on the rostrum to award him further honours but instead of getting up he remained seating, very discourteous. Caesar made the excuse that he felt his falling sickness coming on and didn’t want to embarrass himself. The fact that we are arguing about it 2,000 years later shows it struck a nerve.

(61) The story how at the Feast of the Lupercal (15 February) 44 Antony ran into the forum and offered Caesar a diadem, as of a crown. A handful of people clapped but when Caesar pushed it away everyone clapped. Was this a spontaneous event or a carefully contrived plan to test the water.

Then it was discovered that his statues had been decorated with royal diadems. Two tribunes went round tearing these down but Caesar had them arrested and spoke insultingly of them.

Wanting to be king just doesn’t sound like the man you get to know by reading the Gallic Wars and the Civil War. Maybe he had been corrupted into considering kingship by his time in Egypt. But so much of the rest of his behaviour (consulting the Senate, giving pardoned enemies traditional magistracies) militates against wanting sole rule, that it isn’t consistent, it doesn’t make sense.
In the event, the anti-monarchists struck their blow and ended up with another 15 years of civil war before getting someone considerably more monarchical than Caesar.

(62) Plutarch begins to describe the famous conspiracy against Caesar by profiling Brutus and listing the pressure he was put under by colleagues and conspirators to do something decisive, despite the mercy and many favours Caesar had shown him.

(63) Plutarch retales an impressive list of ill omens and prophecies including two different versions of the dream his wife Calpurnia was said to have had the night before his murder, and the prediction of the soothsayer about the Ides of March (which simply means the 15th of March). On that day Calpurnia begged him to delay that morning’s meeting with the Senate and he was swayed and influenced by her obvious distress.

(64) A different Brutus, Decimus Brutus, arrives to accompany Caesar to the Senate where, he tells Caesar, they were planning to vote to make Caesar king of all the provinces outside Rome. [This seems wholly unlikely to me, that either the Senate would offer this or Caesar would consider it). Decimus uses all the arguments he can think of to encourage Caesar to attend, because he is part of the conspiracy.

(65) Stories about a) a slave and b) the philosophy teacher Artemidorus, who both tried to hand Caesar notes warning him not to go, but either couldn’t get through the throng surrounding Caesar or Caesar was too busy to read the note.

(66) Plutarch is clearly trying to create psychological or literary effects, what with his chapter on evil omens, then the chapter on ill-fated attempts to warn Caesar, and now a chapter saying how ‘fated’ it was that the attack took place in one of the new buildings erected by Pompey in the Field of Mars. Poetic justice.

Caesar’s loyal lieutenant, Mark Antony, was a strong threatening man and so the conspirators arranged for him to be detained in conversation outside the Senate House by Brutus Albinus. Caesar entered the senate and was approached by a man named Tillius Cimber with a petition on behalf of his brother in exile. He accompanied Caesar all the way to his seat, and Caesar became thronged with other complainants and was becoming irritated when Tillius pulled down Caesar’s toga, exposing his neck, and that was the sign for the conspirators to stab Caesar.

He was said to receive 23 wounds in all till he lay convulsing at the bottom of a huge statue of Pompey whose base was covered in blood. It’s always seemed strange to me that it took so many dagger thrusts and he still didn’t die immediately but dodged and evaded. When he saw Brutus holding a dagger he is said to have given up resisting and covered his face with his toga.

(67) Brutus stepped back from the warm corpse and gave an eloquent speech to the Senate explaining why they’d done it, but the majority of the senators panicked and ran out, spreading rumours through the city. Rumour spread fast causing panic among the entire population, many running home and locking their doors. Antony and Lepidus went into hiding. Brutus and the chief conspirators walked to the Capitol holding their daggers, to proclaim that ‘liberty’ had been restored.

Next day Brutus made a speech to the people explaining what they had done and why which was greeted in silence. The Senate passed an act of amnesty in a bid to calm things. It was decided he was to be declared a god and no change made to any of the laws he had passed. Brutus and colleagues were given foreign provinces to govern in the usual fashion.

The question is really, not so much what motivated the conspirators, that’s obvious. It’s why the attempts to return to ‘normal’ republican government failed.

(68) It was when Caesars body was displayed in the forum that a great moaning of lamentation went up. And when his will was read it became clear how generous Caesar had been to the entire Roman population. The crowd constructed a funeral pyre from materials to hand and then turned into a mob and ran to attack the houses of the murderers. This mob stumbled across the harmless Caius Helvius Cinna and, mistaking him for one of the conspirators, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, tore him limb from limb.

In other words assassinating the ‘tyrant’ did absolutely nothing to still the street violence which had stained the 50s with blood. This lynching so terrified Brutus, Cassius and the rest that they fled the city. The rest is told in Plutarch’s life of Brutus.

(69) Summary: Caesar was 56 when he was struck down. Plutarch, with his spooky view of the world, is struck by the way that the fate that looked after Caesar in life pursued every one of the conspirators to untimely ends. [But then I realised some time ago that so did the triumvirs, first Crassus, then Pompey, then Caesar, all ignobly murdered with daggers and swords.]

Plutarch likes melodrama, such as the fact that after his side lost the battle of Philippi Cassius killed himself with the same dagger he’d used to kill Caesar. And that a great comet shone over Rome for a week after the murder, and for the entire summer the sun never properly shone but the land was covered in a fog and fruit and vegetables didn’t ripen properly.

And Plutarch ends his life on a spine-chiller: the story of the larger than life ghost – was it of Caesar –which appeared to Brutus on the eve of defeat at Philippi. Scooby, Scooby-doo!

Thoughts

Plutarch’s life of Caesar adds anecdotes and a big dollop of supernatural superstition to the record but skimps on any kind of political analysis and really skips over Caesar’s awesome military record, covering it with superficial speed and half heartedly. I think this is the worst of Plutarch’s lives. Maybe by 100 or so AD when he was writing them, the story was too well known and had been covered by too many other writers, to really engage him.

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by Simon on May 30, 2022 • Permalink

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Plutarch’s life of Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 to 53 BC)

Marcus Licinius Crassus was reputed to be the richest man in Rome due to astute property development and loan making. In 73 BC he was given command of the army charged with putting down the Spartacus rebellion. In 70 he served as consul. Well into middle age, he formed the triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey in 60 BC, an uneasy alliance which dominated the 50s. In 54 BC he was tempted to assume leadership of an army sent against the Parthian Empire way out East, where his army was defeated and he met a miserable death.

This is one of the shorter lives, at a mere 33 chapters because we in fact know remarkably little about Crassus and Plutarch, apparently, didn’t either. The account of the Spartacus campaign is far longer than really necessary and a good half of the text deals with his final doomed campaign in Parthia. Of the precise origin of Crassus’s business empire and the complex wheeler-dealing which surrounded the triumvirate, there is disappointingly little. Then again, his grim ending was what Crassus became most famous for and also provided a peg for an orgy of the kind of superstitious omens and finger-wagging moralising that the ancients loved so much. So maybe Plutarch knew his audience.

The life

(Chapter 1) Crassus’s father had been censor and was awarded a triumph for military sucess, giddy heights in Roman society. Yet Marcus was raised in a small house where the family ate meals together. Plutarch thinks this may account for his temperate and moderate behaviour in later life. When one of his older brothers died, Marcus married the widow.

(2) Contrasting with his moderation in all other respects was his greed. Starting with a modest legacy he worked it up into an outrageous fortune: during his consulship he sacrificed the tenth of his goods to Hercules but still had enough left over to feasted the people and then give every Roman enough cash to live on for three months! In 54 BC, before he set out on his ill-fated expedition to Parthia (modern-day Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan), Crassus made an inventory of his property and valued it at 7,100 talents. Compare this with the fine of 20,000 talents which Lucius Cornelius Sulla imposed on all the cities and towns of Asia combined and which they found impossible to pay off.

One of Crassus’s business strategies was to hear about fires in the city, rush to the blaze and make the owners of threatened or burning properties offers they couldn’t refuse. If they sold him their property he promptly deployed his private fire service to save it. ‘In this most of Rome came into his possession’!

Crassus had a number of sayings which have been preserved. He said that people who build houses have no need of enemies since they will ruin themselves by their own efforts. He is also supposed to have said that no-one should be thought rich who couldn’t support an entire army out of their own wealth – a handy definition.

Crassus owned silver mines and much land and the labourers to work it. He owned a huge number of slaves but took care to educate and manage them well.

(3) Crassus’s house was open to all. He gave good dinner parties, not showy, His guests were often ordinary people, not the elite. He lent money without interest, which sounds nice, but demanded it be repaid back at exactly the allotted time. Crassus studied the art of public speaking and was always prepared. Sometimes he was ready to speak when Pompey, Caesar or Cicero were reluctant. He had an open approachable manner and would talk to anyone freely. In this way he cultivated great popularity.

(4) When Lucius Cornelius Cinna and Gaius Marius seized power in 87 BC it quickly became obvious they weren’t seeking what was best for the state but to exterminate their enemies. Among these were Crassus’s father and brother who were both murdered in the Marian purges. Young Marcus fled to Spain with some servants. He found shelter in a cave which Plutarch describes at length, making it sound like a boy’s adventure. A friend living locally, Vibius, tasked a slave with taking Crassus meals every day and leaving them a little distance from the cave.

(5) After a while it occurred to Vibius that young Marcus might want more than just food and so he sent his two prettiest slave women to keep him company.

(6) Marius died soon after regaining power in 87 BC and Rome was ruled for three years by Cinna. When Crassus heard that Cinna was dead (84 BC) he headed back to Italy to join Sulla in his march on Rome. Crassus became jealous of Sulla’s open partiality for young Pompey. This was because the latter had more military experience and also because Sulla disliked Crassus’s obvious greed.

(7) Deciding he couldn’t compete with Pompey, Crassus opted to focus on politics. He ingratiated himself with everyone, had a hand in all business affairs, made himself open and available and friendly and helpful to large numbers of people. It was said that Pompey was most powerful when he was out of Rome on campaign whereas back in Rome he was in Crassus’s shade, because he was aloof and selfish. Pompey was powerful because he had so many contacts, friends and money; but he was inconsistent in his alliances, shifting and switching to whatever suited him.

(8) Description of the Spartacus rebellion. How the gladiators escaped from the training school of Lentulus Batiatus at Capua. 78 gladiators escaped, came across a wagon carrying weapons, raided it and elected three leaders.

(9) How the gladiators defeated the praetor Marcus Claudius Glabur by escaping from a hill top using vine ropes then attacking the Romans from the rear. Local shepherds and peasants joined them. Subsequent victories against Publius Varinus, Lucius Furius and Lucius Cossinius. Spartacus tries to persuade his men to march north and cross the Alps but many prefer ravaging and looting Italy. The Senate sent both that year’s consuls against them, and Gellius massacred a group of Germans, but then Spartacus’s main force defeated the other consul, Lentulus, and went on to destroy the arms of Cassius, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul.

(10) It was at this point that Crassus was appointed to supreme command of the war. I am puzzled by this as we had established that Crassus forebore the military and had chosen to concentrate on civilian power. Crassus deputed Mummius to tail Spartacus but on no account to engage. Instead Mummius seized an opportunity to attack and was repelled and beaten by the insurgents, the legions turning tail and running. When they had reported back to Crassus he had 500 of the first to run away and had them decimated: every tenth man was chosen by lot and publicly humiliated and executed.

Spartacus marched to the Straits and made a deal with Cilician pirates to carry them to Sicily, where they hoped to revive the recently quelled slave rising, but the pirates took their money and abandoned them. Then they turned for the heel of Italy where Crassus had his men erect a ditch and wall forty miles long.

(11) Crassus fell upon a contingent resting by a lake in Lucania but Spartacus came to their rescue. Then there was a battle near a hill where Crassus massacred 12,500 of the rebels. Spartacus retired to the mountains of Petelia, trailed by Roman forces. Then he turned and engaged them, routing them and nearly killing the quaestor.

But this made the rebels over-confident and they turned to confront Crassus’s main army as it was making camp for the night. This developed into a full battle in which the rebels were comprehensively defeated.

Pompey was approaching with a second army and this engaged the stragglers from Spartacus’s force and wiped them out. To Crassus’s immense chagrin Pompey was awarded a magnificent triumph for his victory in Spain against Sertorius while Crassus was given the much more modest ‘ovation’ for a war which all the nobles thought had been dishonourable from start to finish.

(12) Crassus and Pompey were made consuls for the next year but publicly disagreed about everything. However, at one of their last appearances before the people a man leapt onstage and claimed that Jupiter had appeared to him in a dream and told him the consuls mustn’t part without being friends. Characteristically it was Crassus who made the first move and seized Pompey by the hand and praised him.

(13) In 63 Crassus was elected censor but made none of the reforms expected of the post. His colleague in the post strongly objected to Crassus’s policy that Egypt should be annexed by Rome and so the two men resigned their posts.

At the time of the Cataline conspiracy in 63 BC Crassus was accused of being party to the plot, not least by Cicero. This resulted in Crassus’s enmity towards the latter, until his own son, Publius, a devoted follower of the orator, persuaded him to forgive and forget.

(14) In 60 BC Caesar returned from service in Spain and was lobbying to be elected consul for the following year. He persuaded Crassus and Pompey that their enmity was weakening both and letting the party of Cicero and Cato triumph. He proposed they form an alliance, telling each man they’d be stronger together. In reality the person who benefited most was Caesar who was not only elected consult but awarded command in Gaul.

In the spring of 56 arguments threatened to break the triumvirate but Caesar called Pompey, Crassus and a good number of senators to a conference at Luca in north Italy where agreement was reached and the triumvirate reconfirmed. Caesar’s rule in Gaul was extended and the other two were allotted provinces and armies.

(15) On their return to the capital many opponents, led by Cato, interpreted the deal as establishing a tyranny based on armies not on elected office. Cato persuaded Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus to stand for the consulship but this led to growing violence at the hustings, with Pompey’s supporters attacking Ahenobarbus’s entourage, killing some of them, and then attacking the assembly, manhandling Cato out of the forum and so on.

(16) So all their opponents were intimidated into staying at home and Crassus and Pompey were elected consuls. They drew lots for their spheres of influence and Crassus won the East. He was thrilled as he openly boasted of superseding Lucullus and Pompey’s achievements against the enemy kings, Mithridates and Tigranes, and was desperate to take on the Parthian Empire. Critics tried to talk him out of it and then block his path as he departed Rome.

(17) Crassus sailed with a large army to Galatia and overland to the Euphrates, crossing into Parthian territory. When he discovered old King Deiotarus founding a new city, he joked that he was late in life to do such a thing, but the king joked back that Crassus was pretty long in the tooth to be taking on a massive military mission. He was 60 but looked older.

Another bad omen came. Most of the cities of Mesopotamia went over to him when they saw his army. But at one, Zenodotia, ruled by Apollonius the tyrant, a hundred of his soldiers were slain so Crassus let his forces seize and plunder it and sold its inhabitants into slavery. For this his soldiers hailed him ‘Imperator’ but this wasn’t any kind of military triumph, it was massacring civilians, and the fact Crassus let his soldiers call him Imperator, and was pleased by it, was a worrying indication of his lack of experience or of seriousness, of what Plutarch’s calls ‘a paltry spirit’.

Worse, instead of reaching out to Babylon and Seleucia for alliance against Parthia, he spent all his time in the cities which had come over to him in Syria in mercenary not military activity. Thus instead of reviewing his troops and setting up athletic contests for them, he spent his time counting the money and weighing the treasure he’d acquired. He demanded soldiers and supplies from ‘districts and dynasts’ only to change his mind if they paid him off, thus losing their respect.

As they were leaving the temple of Venus, Crassus’s son (who accompanied him on the campaign) stumbled and fell at the gate, and then his father fell over him.

(18) Men come to the camp from the occupied cities and bring eye witness accounts of the strong armour and warlike temper of the Parthians. Word spreads among the troops who become demoralised. Many, including Caius Cassius Longinus, advise calling a halt and reconsidering the entire campaign. The seers keep seeing bad omens.

(19) Artabazes the king of Armenia arrived to ally with Crassus, bringing 6,000 horsemen and promising an additional 10,000 mail-clad horsemen and 30,000 footmen. He advised Crassus to approach Parthia from Armenia, which is hilly so the cavalry, which were Parthia’s sole military strength, would be disadvantaged. But Crassus preferred to march across flat Mesopotamia. Then Plutarch gives an impressive list of bad omens:

as the army crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma it was daunted by peals of thunder and flashes of lightning; a strong wind destroyed the raft Crassus was crossing on
the place he intended to camp was hit by two thunderbolts
one of the general’s horses violently dragged its groom down to the river and disappeared beneath the waves
the first eagle which was raised aloft, faced about of its own accord
when the rations were distributed after the crossing of the river, lentils and salt came first, which are traditional Roman signs of mourning
while addressing his men Crassus made a bad slip, telling them he would destroy the bridge over the river so that none of could return, when he meant there would be no going back – instead of inspiring it demoralised his men
when he was making the customary sacrifice of purification for the army, and the seer placed the viscera in his hands, Crassus clumsily let them fall to the ground, at which all the bystanders were appalled

It’s impossible to tell whether any of this actually happened or whether, as in Cicero’s definition of inventio as explained in the introduction to Sallust, this is the kind of thing which ought to have happened. In other words, these incidents which read to us like fairy stories and folk tales and tend to undermine Plutarch’s veracity, to the ancient mind did just the opposite, piling up all kinds of appropriate details and omens which made the events more plausible.

(20) Crassus advanced with seven legions of men-at‑arms, nearly 4,000 horsemen and about as many light-armed troops. Scouts reported the land was empty of men but they’d seen the tracks of horsemen who had approached the army but wheeled about and left. Cassius advised caution and recuperating the men in one of the garrison cities while he found out more about the enemy.

You can see how the cumulative effect of the bad omens and the persistent advice Crassus receives, from both Romans and allies, creates a very ominous and dramatic tension in the narrative.

(21) Now aan Osroene chieftain named Ariamnes arrived in the Roman camp who set about deceiving Crassus. He had helped Pompey in his campaigns and now tried to persuade Crassus to abandon the river and venture into the flat plain (best fighting ground for the Parthian cavalry). And encourages him to do it soon before the king’s forces are united.

This was all a lie for the king was at that moment ravaging Armenia for its offers of friendship to Crassus, while he sent Surena forward to make trial of the enemy in battle and to distract them. There follows a brief and preposterously inflated description of Surena, presumably to big him up into a worthy opponent of Crassus. ‘He used to travel on private business with a baggage train of a thousand camels, and was followed by two hundred wagons for his concubine’. 200 wagons for his concubines!

(22) Thus Plutarch claims it was Ariamnes who persuaded Crassus to abandon the river and led him out into a plain which was flat at first but then turned into undulating sand, no trees, no water. Messengers came from Artavasdes II, king of Armenia, saying a) he is being attacked by Hyrodes the Parthian b) for Crassus to come and join him in a united war or c) to make sure he stuck near mountains and hills where the feared cavalry couldn’t operate. [The name Hyrodes is nowadays given as Orodes and he was the second Parthian king of that name, Orodes II.]

Cassius has given up trying to warn Crassus, who was angry with him, and reserved his scorn for the joking joshing Arab who led the army into the wilderness.

(23) In keeping with the steady ratcheting up of tension, Plutarch says that on the fateful day of the disastrous battle, Crassus by mistake didn’t dress in a purple robe but in a black one (which seems wildly unlikely) and that the standard-bearers had great difficulty raising their standards, which seemed to be embedded in the earth. Scouts return to announce that the enemy is coming up in great numbers.

Crassus assembles his men in one long line but then changes his mind and makes them form squares, accompanied by a cavalry squad. The army came to a stream but instead of letting them rest and refresh, Crassus insisted on making them continue on a forced march. They come upon Surena’s advance guard who appear to be surprisingly small, until the war drums of the main force behind them boomed out, disheartening the Romans.

(24) Plutarch describes the battle in detail. The Parthians initially planned to charge until they saw the solidity of the Roman squares. Then they sent cavalry to surround the squares. When light troops ran out to skirmish with them, everyone saw how effective the Parthian arrows were at penetrating armour and the army first started to be scared. Then the Parthians started to fire into the densely packed squares of Romans.

(25) At first Crassus thought they would run out of arrows till he realised they had a camel train carrying bags of extra arrows. He lost heart. He ordered his son on the left wing to attack. Publius Crassus led his wing in pursuit of the Parthians who broke and ran, but only to lure them into an ambush where they were surrounded by Parthian horsemen circling round them and stirring up dust.

Publius roused his cavalry to charge again but their spears could do little against the Parthian breastplates of hide and steel whereas the long Parthian pikes did great damage. Publius’s Gauls put up a good fight, crawling under the Parthian horses to stab them and perishing when horse and rider fell on them. They seized Publius who had been injured and took him to a sandy hill to make a last stand but they were surrounded and annihilated by arrows.

Two Greeks tried to persuade Publius to abandon his troops and come with them to a nearby Greek city but he bade them leave, remaining with his troops. Then he turned his side to his shield bearer and told him to stab him to death. Other nobles also committed suicide. The redoubt was massacred and the victorious Parthians cut off Publius’s head.

(26) Meanwhile Crassus initially thought his son’s charge was successful and the main army weakened as some left to deal with it. But then he received messages begging for help. Conflicted, Crassus ordered the whole army to advance. But the enemy rallied and strengthened, started beating their damn war drums and then rode up with Publius’s head on a pike to taunt him. The army is daunted but this is Crassus’s finest hour, and Plutarch has him delivering a stirring speech invoking Rome’s glorious history of victory whatever the cost.

(27) The slaughter continued until night fell and the Parthians backed away and made camp. Crassus lies on the ground in black despair so his lieutenants decide to retreat, rouse the army and back west despite the lamentations of the wounded they leave to die in the desert. An advance guard under Ignatius reached Carrhae at midnight and told the garrison commander, Coponius, to send out reinforcements to help the stricken army, and so the survivors are all brought within the walls of Carrhae.

(28) At daybreak the Parthians slaughtered all the wounded lying about the plain to the number of 4,000, then surrounded and massacred four cohorts who had got separated from the main body of the Roman army.

Surena isn’t sure whether Crassus is in Carrhae or whether his army has fled further west so he sends attendants up to the wall calling for Crassus or Cassius. Crassus comes to the city walls and the ambassadors propose Crassus accept an honourable truce, sign a peace treaty and leave Mesopotamia. They invite him to a conference with Surena. Crassus agrees.

(29) But having confirmed that Crassus was in the city, Surena changed his tune and surrounded it, with men deputed to mock the Romans and telling them to send Crassus and Cassius out in chains.

Morale collapses and his lieutenants suggest Crassus flee the city abandoning his army. But his closest Greek adviser, Andromachus, is a double agent and reports this to Surena. And when this escape party sets out that night in secret from the city Andromachus treacherously leads them a zigzag route through marshes. Cassius left with 500 cavalry by a different route and made it to Syria. Octavius led 5,000 to a hill country named Sinnaca.

[Only now does it become clear that when Plutarch said Crassus left Carrhae, he meant with a significant armed force (four cohorts of men-at‑arms, a few horsemen all told, and five lictors). Add in Octavius’s forces and you can see that a lot of the army got away. This suggests that Surena wasn’t mounting a very effective siege and throws into doubt the whole story about the Roman army taking refuge in the city.]

Anyway, up come the Parthians and surround Crassus’s force on a hill but Octavius fights his way through to join him.

(30) Surena realised that, with night coming on, the Romans were likely to escape into the hills. So he changed his approach and a) released prisoners who had overheard staged conversations between Surena and lieutenants saying it was time for peace, which softened Crassus up for when b) Surena and lieutenants made their way up the hill under truce, symbolically unstrung his bow and held out his hand, offering peace.

Crassus hesitates to accept but the army rebelled, clashed their shields and insist they will fight no longer. So much against his better judgement Crassus is more or less forced to go down the hill to meet with Surena.

(31) Octavius insists on joining him with his entourage. Then Plutarch gives a detailed description of the scuffle which leads to the fray in which Crassus is killed. Crassus had walked down on foot while Surena had advanced on horseback. He said it ill befitted his opponent to be on foot and offered a fine horse with gold-studded bridle. Surena’s lifted Crassus onto it then ran alongside slapping it to make it ride faster. But Octavius and a tribune seized the bridle to slow it down and keep Crassus in their protection. A scuffled developed and blows were exchanged. Octavius drew his sword and killed one of the grooms but was himself killed. Crassus was killed by a Parthian named Pomaxathres.

Rumour has it that the Parthians cut off Crassus’s head and right hand. Some of the Roman embassy made it back to the hilltop redoubt. That night they tried to sneak away but very few made it out of the desert alive. Most were hunted down and cut to pieces. ‘In the whole campaign, twenty thousand are said to have been killed, and ten thousand to have been taken alive’ – as usual with ancient accounts, these are suspiciously round figures.

(32) Surena sent the head and hand of Crassus to King Hyrodes in Armenia. Then he organised a mock triumph in the city of Seleucia, with a Roman noble forced to wear a dress being set on a horse backwards and mockingly saluted as ‘Crassus’, with lictors on camels and troupes of actors and musicians mocking the fallen Romans.

Plutarch makes a big deal out of the fact that the Parthians discovered in Crassus’s baggage train a copy of the ‘Milesiaca’ by Aristides, a collection of love stories. These are read out and mocked as inappropriate to take on a military campaign, but Plutarch acidly points out that this was rich coming from a leader (Surena) who himself led wagon-loads of concubines and whose train trailed off in the rear into dances, cymbals, lutes, and nocturnal revels with women. Plutarch quotes Aesop’s fable of the two wallets. He is more interested in literary allusions than history per se.

(33) Meanwhile, in faraway Armenia, King Hyrodes was at last reconciled with king Artavasdes II and agreed to receive the latter’s sister as wife for his son Pacorus. Both kings were (supposedly) well educated in Greek literature and when the head of Crassus arrived at the palace, as part of the wedding feast a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae was underway. The messenger threw Crassus’s head on the stage and the lead actor picked it up and addressed it with Euripides’ lines.

Then the man who had actually killed Crassus, Pomaxathres, stepped forward and claimed the head. King Hyrodes was delighted and gave both men rewards. Plutarch moralises: thus was the tragedy of Crassus, as is traditional, followed by farce.

[The later historian, Cassius Dio, claimed that the Parthians poured molten gold into Crassus’s mouth in symbolic mockery of his thirst for wealth. Thus grotesque gossip and macabre stories accrue around famous men.]

The text contains one last afterthought, presumably designed to ram home the perfidious treachery of the wicked orientals: soon afterwards Hyrodes became jealous of Surena’s fine reputation and had him put to death. Then Hyrodes lost his son Pacorus, defeated in battle by the Romans, and became ill, so that another of his sons, Phraates, had his father strangled.

All lives end in death, but this short life feels particularly grim and depressing.

Plutarch’s summary

For Plutarch, Crassus’s fate was:

to the multitude an illustration of the ways of fortune, but to the wise an example of foolish ambition, which would not let him rest satisfied to be first and greatest among many myriads of men, but made him think, because he was judged inferior to two men only, that he lacked everything. (27)

I.e. he was driven to his death because of rivalry with his two partners in the triumvirate, Pompey and Caesar.

Superstitions and omens

It is said that when he was first brought to Rome to be sold, a serpent was seen coiled about his face as he slept, and his wife, who was of the same tribe as Spartacus, a prophetess, and subject to visitations of the Dionysiac frenzy, declared it the sign of a great and formidable power which would attend him to a fortunate issue. (8)

When Crassus is marching out of Rome for the East his way is blocked by a critic, Ateius:

Ateius ran on ahead to the city gate, placed there a blazing brazier, and when Crassus came up, cast incense and libations upon it, and invoked curses which were dreadful and terrifying in themselves, and were reinforced by sundry strange and dreadful gods whom he summoned and called by name. The Romans say that these mysterious and ancient curses have such power that no one involved in them ever escapes, and misfortune falls also upon the one who utters them, wherefore they are not employed at random nor by many. And accordingly at this time they found fault with Ateius because it was for the city’s sake that he was angered at Crassus, and yet he had involved the city in curses which awakened much superstitious terror.

There follows a steadily increasing crescendo of bad omens as Crassus’s army advanced into the badlands. Surely these are classic examples of Cicero’s inventio. This is what ought to have happened for the gods are just and send us omens and prophecies and so every fraught event must be accompanied by heavenly signs. Precisely what makes this aspect of these ancient texts ludicrous to us, made them plausible and convincing to most of their readers.

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Plutarch

Plutarch was a Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He lived from about 46 to about 120 AD. He was a prolific writer in all genres; an ancient catalogue attributes no fewer than 227 works to Plutarch, of which 78 have come down to us.

Plutarch is most famous for the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of eminent Greek and Roman leaders. These were arranged in pairs, one Greek and one Roman, in order to compare their lives and achievements and characters. The surviving lives contain 23 pairs of biographies as well as four unpaired single lives = 50 lives in total.

As he explains in the opening paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with history as such, with the broad sweep of historical events, but with exploring how the characters of famous men influenced their lives and destinies. Hence a lot of room is taken up with gossip and anecdote on the assumption that this often tells you more about a person than their official CV. Plutarch consciously sought to create a portrait of each figure and himself compares his craft to that of a painter.

In his history of the Roman republic, Tom Holland explains that the parallel lives only make sense in the format Plutarch conceived them for, as pairs, and disapproves of the way Penguin Books rearranged the lives, removing them from their pairings and reorganising them by chronological period, to produce volumes of biographies of just Greeks or Romans, thus losing the point of the entire project.

It was on this editorial principle that, in 1958, Penguin published a volume of six lives from the last 70 or so years of the Roman Republic, being Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar and Cicero, entitled Fall of the Roman Republic, translated by the novelist and Classicist Rex Warner (1905 to 1986).

In his very brief introduction to the Penguin edition, Warner justifies the decision by arguing that a) Plutarch’s original pairings of Greeks and Romans often have very little in common and feel ‘artificial’, so that b) translating the original pairings runs the risk of confusing the reader by forcing him or her to jump backwards and forwards between the very different social, economic and historical backgrounds of Greece and Rome. It’s a persuasive argument.

(And to be fair to Penguin they have in recent years reconsidered this editorial decision and published some of the lives in the original pairs as Plutarch intended. So the most recent edition of this volume of six Roman lives for the first time includes the brief passages Plutarch wrote comparing the lives of his Greek and Roman exemplars.)

Rex Warner (1905 to 1986)

Born in 1905, Warner went to public school and on to Oxford where he was associated with the Auden group. He wrote poetry, plays and novels, and is best remembered for the eccentric allegorical novel, The Aerodrome (1941), which I reviewed a few years ago.

From 1945 to 1947 he was in Athens as Director of the British Institute and became involved in numerous translations of classical Greek and Latin authors. His 1954 translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War for Penguin Classics sold over a million copies and helped to establish the commercial and cultural viability of Penguin Classics. Warner went on to translate Xenophon, Caesar and this selection of Plutarch’s Roman lives for Penguin.

Bill Thayer

An American named Bill Thayer has created a fabulous website onto which he has transcribed all 50 of Plutarch’s parallel lives (as well as a staggering amount of other ancient literature). They’re all given in the out-of-copyright 1923 Loeb Classical Library edition by Bernadotte Perrin. It includes interesting notes, handy maps, and a very useful list of all Plutarch’s lives in the form of a table.

When I saw this table I realised I wanted to read more than just the 6 lives included in the Penguin volume. I was particularly intrigued by the less well-known characters of Sertorius and Lucullus who had walk-on parts in several of the histories I’ve read. In fact I realised there were no fewer than 11 Plutarch lives from the final century of the Roman Republic which I was curious to read. In chronological order of birth these are as follows, with the ones in this Penguin edition in bold:

Marius (b. 157)
Sulla (b. 138)
Lucullus (b. 118)
Crassus (b. 115)
Sertorius (b. 126)
Pompey (b. 106)
Cicero (b. 106)
Caesar (b. 100)
Cato the Younger (b. 95)
Antony (b. 83)
Brutus (b. 85)

Some I read in the Rex Warner Penguin translation, some in the 1923 Loeb classics edition, some swapping between the two. In order to be clear and consistent, references are to the long-established ‘chapter’ numbers which each life is divided into.

Initially I reviewed Marius and Sulla in the form of a summary overview of their lives and careers, taking material from other sources to make them historically accurate but this just ended up making them into second-rate Wikipedia articles.

I realised it was more useful to stick closely to what Plutarch actually wrote, summarising every one of his short ‘chapters’, and recording the eccentric material he periodically includes – the anecdotes and omens and folk tales and sayings – precisely because that’s the kind of thing which doesn’t appear in the conventional histories or biographies but sheds most light about h ow the ancients thought about great figures and great events.

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) 4. Republican timeline

This is a timeline of the Roman Republic, cobbled together from various sources with some details added from Mary Beard’s history of Rome, SPQR.

As you can see, it consists almost entirely of wars because Rome was one of the most aggressive and relentlessly militaristic states in the ancient world, which is the basic reason for its eventual world domination. And when, by about 80 BC, they’d run out of people to conquer, they started fighting each other.

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life and Roman writers organised the history of this period…around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day.

…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…

The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year…(SPQR, pages 176 to 177)

What this list – far from complete and omitting many battles – indicates is the unremittingly violent, warlike environment Rome inhabited, and the relentlessness of its armies and leaders who, no matter how many times they lost battles – and they lost a lot more than you’d expect – always found new men and new resources and came back harder.

The early legendary material is well covered in Mary Beard’s book and the main wars are at least mentioned. But she gives very superficial, if any, explanations of most of the wars with hardly anything about strategies and campaigns, and nothing at all about specific battles, even the most famous (Cannae, Carrhae, Pharsalus, Actium). I had to look up the detail of all of them online.

Again and again it struck me as odd that Mary Beard has made it her life’s work to study a society whose values and history, whose militarism, violence, aggression, patriarchal sexism and toxic masculinity she is so obviously out of sympathy with.

This is one reason why, as a disapproving feminist, her account of the Republic is so patchy and episodic given that the Republic’s history is, on one level, a long list of wars and battles and setbacks and conquests.

Another reason is that the men in charge in Rome changed on an annual basis as new consuls were elected and held power for just one year. Compared to the late republic and imperial era when successful generals held power, and carried out military strategy for years, this makes the wars of the Republic even more complicated to record and remember.

As a historian I can see that you face a choice between going into each war in enough detail to make it strategically and militarily understandable – in which case you will have written an incredibly detailed and very long military history of Rome. Or doing what Beard does, which is write a kind of thematic social and political history of Rome (with lots of archaeology thrown in) which only dips into the wars briefly, fleetingly, when they help you to demonstrate a particular point about the evolution of Roman society and politics.

I can see why, for practical and editorial reasons she’s taken the latter route but still, Rome without the wars – numerous and confusing though they are – is a bit like Hamlet without the prince.

Timeline

8th century BC

753 BC: The legendary founding date of Rome.

750?: Rape of the Sabine women. Plenty of young men were flocking to his new settlement, but Romulus needed women to breed. He approached local tribes for brides but was turned down. Eventually he invited a group from a local tribe, the Sabines to a feast and, at an arranged signal, young Roman men started carrying the marriageable away. This led to war but then to a notable event. As the two sides lined up to fight the Sabine women intervened between them pleading for peace. The men put down their weapons and made peace, Romulus agreeing to share his kingship of Rome with the Sabine leader, Titus Tatius. So the abduction is important – but so is the peacemaking ability of the women.

The French painter Jacques-Louis David chooses to depict ‘The Intervention of the Sabine Women’ between their avenging fathers and brothers on one side, and their new Roman husbands on the other, rather than the more famous ‘rape’, in this painting from 1799.

753 to 510: Seven kings The quarter-millennium rule of the seven legendary kings of Rome. Some traditions mention other sub-kings who ruled in gaps between the big seven, and even Livy’s traditionalist account emphasises that the kingship didn’t simply progress by primogeniture i.e. to the eldest son, but was sometimes elected or chosen by the people.

But as Beard explains, modern archaeology suggests the traditional tale of a quarter millennium of legendary kings was used to glamorise and cover what, in reality, probably amounted to the slow coalescing of small communities of herders and cattle farmers led by local chieftains.

6th century BC

534 to 510: Reign of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, last king of Rome. Tarquin was expelled after the people revolt and overthrow him, traditionally said to have been caused by one of his privileged sons raping a worthy Roman matron, Lucretia, at dagger point.

509: Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (literally ‘Jupiter the Best and Greatest’) also known as the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus because it was built on the Capitoline Hill. Dedicated to the Capitoline Triad consisting of Jupiter and his companion deities, Juno and Minerva, it was the oldest and most prestigious temple in Rome till it burned down in 83 BC during Sulla’s violent occupation of Rome. It became the traditional place for victorious generals to place trophies. Also lost in this fire were the Sibylline Books, a collection of oracles in Greek hexameters, that were purchased from a sibyl or prophetess by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and were consulted at moments of crisis through the history of the Republic and the Empire.

5th century BC

495: After losing a prolonged struggle to regain his throne, Tarquinius Superbus, last king of Rome, dies in exile at Cumae.

484: The first temple of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) is dedicated in Rome’s Forum Romanum by Aulus Postumius following his victory over the Latins (the tribe who occupied the county surrounding Rome) at the Battle of Lake Regillus.

450: The number of Roman quaestors is increased to four and opened to plebians.

449: The Twelve Tables, the earliest examples of Roman law, are compiled. They were the result of agitation by the plebeian class, who had hitherto been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. The law had previously been unwritten and exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the pontifices. They formed the basis of Roman law for 1,000 years. The Twelve Tables were inscribed on bronze and publicly displayed so that unwritten law restricted to a ruling class was converted to written law accessible to all.

440: Roman quaestors are chosen by the assembly rather than by the consuls.

4th century BC

390: Battle of the Allia (11 miles north of Rome) at which the Senones, a Gallic tribe led by Brennus, crushed a Roman army and subsequently marched to and occupied Rome. Later historians describe the city as being out to fire and sword: ‘no living being was thenceforth spared; the houses were rifled, and then set on fire’ (Livy Book 5). The traditional date is 390, modern scholars have adjusted this to 387. The Gaulish Sack of Rome led to fear of Gaulish armies or marauders which lasted centuries.

Rome spent the next 32 years fighting the Volsci, the Etruscans and the rebel Latin cities.

366: Institution of the role of praetor, a title granted by the government of Ancient Rome to a man acting in one of two official capacities, as i) the commander of an army or ii) as an elected magistrate.

348: Plague strikes Rome.

343 to 341: First Samnite War, the Samnites being a tribe from central Italy, was the result of Rome’s intervention to rescue the Campanian city of Capua from a Samnite attack.

340 to 338: The Latin War (the Latins being another nearby tribe). Victory for Rome.

337: Until this year praetors were chosen only from among the patricians. In 337 eligibility for the praetura was opened to plebeians.

334: Rome signs a peace treaty with the Senones tribe i.e. the Gauls who sacked Rome.

326 to 304: Second Samnite War was the result of Rome’s intervention in the politics of the city of Naples and developed into a contest over the control of central and southern Italy.

3rd century BC

298 to 290: Third Samnite War:

297: Third Samnite War: Celts and Samnites join forces and defeat the Romans at the Battle of Camertium.

295: Third Samnite War: In a battle lasting all day, Romans narrowly defeat a force of Celts and Samnites at the Battle of Sentinum, the decisive battle of the war.

294: Third Samnite War: A Roman army led by Lucius Postimius Megellus defeats an army from Etruscan Volsinii.

285 to 282: Rome defeats the Celts in Italy. Rome’s dominance in central Italy is secured.

284: Gauls of the Insubres and Boii tribes defeat the Romans at the Battle of Arretium.

283: Rome decisively defeats the Senones at Picenum. Rome defeats the Etruscans and Celts at the Battle of Lake Vadimo.

280 to 272: Roman war against Tarentum in southern Italy. Upon victory, Rome’s dominance in lower Italy is secured.

280: The Romans conquer the Etruscan cities of Tarquinia, Volsinii and Vulci.

264 to 241: First Punic War. Carthage cedes Sicily to Rome.

241 to 238: Rebellion of the mercenaries. Unpaid mercenaries under the leadership of Mathos and Spendios rebel against Carthage. Despite their peace treaty, Rome takes the opportunity to strip Carthage of Sardinia and Corsica.

229 to 228 Rome fights Illyrian pirates. Queen Teuta pays tribute to Rome.

225: Two Roman armies surround and defeat a Celtic army at the Battle of Telamon.

223: Romans successfully campaign against the Celtic tribes of Cisalpine Gaul.

222: Rome conquers Cisalpine Gaul (modern-day Provence, France).

222: The Celts are defeated at the Battle of Clastidium by Roman forces.

219: Illyrian coast is under Roman control.

218 to 201: Second Punic War the main feature of which is Hannibal Barca bringing an army from Spain along the south of France and over the Alps into Italy where it remained for fifteen long years, and the non-confrontational, attritional tactics of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, surnamed ‘Cunctator’.

216: The Battle of Cannae, Hannibal inflicts the worst ever military defeat in Roman history at Cannae 200 miles south-east of Rome (p.180). The authorities consulted the famous Sibylline Books and, on their recommendation, two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in the main marketplace (p.180). Hannibal ante portas meaning ‘Hannibal at the gates’. Hannibal Barca, Carthaginian general, directly threatens the city of Rome, but cannot advance due to lack of supplies and reinforcements.

c. 215 to 216: The Boii crush a Roman army 25,000 strong at Litana. Victory was partly achieved by pushing cut trees down on top of the Romans as they marched.

214 to 205: First Macedonian War: Traditionally, the Macedonian Wars include the four wars with Macedonia, plus one war with the Seleucid Empire, and a final minor war with the Achaean League of Greece. All together they span the period 214 to 148.

The Greek peninsula and west coast of what is now Turkey were characterised by numerous states jostling for position. The triggers for war were some smaller states asking Rome for protection against the two largest powers in the region, the Macedonian Kingdom and Seleucid Empire. The first war ran in parallel to the First Punic War i.e. Rome was fighting on two fronts.

In 216 King Philip V of Macedon had allied himself with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was roaming at large through Italy. Rome dispatched an army eastwards which did little more than skirmish with Macedonian forces and seize minor territory along the Adriatic coastline. Rome wasn’t interested in conquest, but in keeping Macedon too busy to send forces to join with Hannibal. The war ended indecisively in 205 BC with the Treaty of Phoenice.

205: On the recommendation of the Sybilline Books, in response to the ongoing Punic War, a poor harvest and other ill omens, an image of Cybele/the Great Goddess was transferred from Asia Minor to Rome. Weirdly, the goddess turned out to take the form of a black meteoric stone accompanied by a retinue of self-castrated, self-flagellating, long-haired priests (p.179).

204: Scipio Africanus sails to North Africa to take the Second Punic War directly to the enemy (p.182). After he had defeated the Carthaginians in two major battles and won the allegiance of the Numidian kingdoms of North Africa, Carthage ordered Hannibal to return to protect the mother city, thus ending his 15-year campaign in Italy without a decisive victory.

202 October: Scipio wins the decisive Battle of Zama, destroying the Carthaginian army. Rome imposes a punitive peace treaty. Hannibal survives but goes into exile in the eastern Mediterranean. It was at this point that Publius Cornelius Scipio was given the agnomen or ‘victory name’ Africanus, so he is often referred to as Scipio (family name) Africanus (victory name) to distinguish him from other members of his (eminent) family.

201: As part of peace treating ending the Second Punic War, Sicily is definitively made a Roman province.

2nd century BC

200 to 196: Second Macedonian War: In the resulting Treaty of Tempea, Philip V was forbidden from interfering with affairs outside his borders, and was required to relinquish his recent Greek conquests. At the Olympiad in 196 Rome proclaimed the ‘Freedom of the Greeks and relapsed into its former apathy.

193: The Boii are defeated by the Romans, suffering, according to Livy, 14,000 dead.

192 to 188: Seleucid War Antiochus III, ‘the Great’, sixth ruler of the Seleucid Empire, invades Greece from Asia Minor. Various Greek cities appealed to Rome for help and a major Roman-Greek force was mobilised under the command of the great hero of the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus, which landed and started inflicting defeats.

191 to 134: Various resistance movements against Rome in Iberia.

190: Roman army under Scipio defeats Antiochus III at the Battle of Magnesia. Apart from his other crimes, Antiochus was harbouring Rome’s long-term enemy, Hannibal (p.176).

c. 188: Treaty of Apamea Kibotos establishes peace with the Seleucid Empire and Rome plus its allies, such as Pergamon and Rhodes. The Seleucids have to evacuate their forces from Asia Minor and to pay a huge war indemnity.

172 to 168: Third Macedonian War: Philip of Macedon’s son, Perseus, challenges Rome and is defeated.

168: Roman legions smash the Macedonians at the Battle of Pydna. Twice Rome had withdrawn from Greece, leaving the city states to their own devices, assuming there would be peace, but instead facing renewed threats. So now Rome decided to establish its first permanent foothold in the Greek world. The Kingdom of Macedonia was divided by the Romans into four client republics.

154 to 139: Viriato leads the Lusitanians against Rome.

150 to 148: The Fourth Macedonian War Macedonian pretender to the throne Andriscus was destabilizing Greece. The Romans defeated him at the Second Battle of Pydna.

149 to 146: Third Punic War: Despite the fact that Carthage had obeyed all the provisions of the treaty which ended the Second Punic War, hawks in the Senate wanted to finish her off for good. When Carthage broke the treaty by retaliating against Masinissa king of the neighbouring Numidians’ repeated raids into Carthaginian territory, the hawks took this as an opportunity to declare war. Rome sent an army of 50,000 men then demanded that the Carthaginians must hand over all of their armaments and warships.

Carthage agreed to this humiliating demand, but when Rome went on to insist that they burn their city to the ground, relocate inland and change from being a seafaring, trading people to becoming farmers, the Carthaginians rebelled and broke off negotiations. The Roman army settled down for a siege of the city which dragged on for two long years. In the spring of 146 the besiegers, led by Scipio Aemilianus (an adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus) broke into the city which they burned and ransacked for 6 days, finally selling the 50,000 survivors into slavery, and razing the city to the ground.

The remaining Carthaginian territories were annexed by Rome and reconstituted to become the Roman province of Africa with Utica as its capital. Roman Africa became a major source of foodstuffs for Rome for centuries to come.

146: The Achaean War Following on from the fourth Macedonian war, the Achaean League mobilised for a new war against Rome. It was a foolish idea the historian Polybius blames on the demagogues of the cities of the league. The Achaean League was swiftly defeated and, as an object lesson, Rome utterly destroyed the city of Corinth in 146, the same year that Carthage was destroyed. To try to ensure peace Rome divided Macedonia into two new Roman provinces, Achaea and Epirus. From this point onwards Greece was ruled by Rome.

139: Law introduced the secret ballot.

137: 4,000 Celtiberians trap a force of 20,000 Romans at the Siege of Numantia, forcing their surrender.

135 to 132: First Servile War in Sicily, led by Eunus, a former slave claiming to be a prophet, and Cleon from Cilicia.

133: Rome captures Numantia, ending Iberian resistance.

133: Attalus III, the last king of Pergamon, bequeathes the whole of his kingdom to Rome.

133: The plebeian Tiberius Gracchus proposes sweeping land reforms which are so bitterly opposed by aggrieved landowners that he is murdered, bludgeoned to death. 70 years later Cicero saw this murder and the year 133 as opening up the fault lines of Roman society between two groups he calls the optimates and the populares (though modern scholars doubt the existence whether these really existed as organised groupings).

125: Rome intervenes on behalf of Massalia against the Saluvii Celts.

121: Gallia Narbonensis becomes a Roman province.

112 to 106: The Jugurthine War Numidia was a north African kingdom roughly covering the northern coastal part of what is now modern-day Algeria is. When the old king died the kingdom was disputed between his two sons and Jugurtha, his ambitious nephew.

111: Jugurtha murders his main rival along with many Roman merchants in a Numidian town. The Roman populace cried out for revenge but the event triggered an amazing sequence of delays caused by Jugurtha’s wholesale bribery and corruption of envoys sent to parley with him and then, once he’d gone to Rome, of various senators and officials dealing with him. The way Jugurtha was able to bribe and cajole his way out of various tight spots came to be seen as symbolic of the endemic corruption which had infected the body politic and inspired a vitriolic history of the war by this historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually referred to as Sallust, writing a generation after the events (86 to 35 BC).

113 to 101: The Cimbrian War The Cimbri were a Germanic tribe who, in one account, hailed from Denmark and went trekking through Germany and down towards the Danube. Local tribes allied to the Romans asked for help and Rome sent an army under the Roman consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo which was annihilated.

109: Cimbrian War: the Cimbri invade the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis and defeat the Roman army there under Marcus Junius Silanus.

108: Jugurthine War: Gaius Marius elected consul and given command of the army against Jugurtha.

107: Jugurthine War: the Tribal Assembly awards command of the Roman army in north Africa to the very ambitious general Gaius Marius Lucius Cornelius Sulla as his quaestor.

107: Cimbrian War: The Romans are defeated by the Tigurini, allies of the Cimbri. The Cimbri defeated another Roman army at the Battle of Burdigala (Bordeaux) killing its commander, the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravalla.

106: Jugurthine War: The Second Battle of Cirta Romans under Gaius Marius with quaestor Lucius Cornelius Sulla as cavalry commander, defeated a Numidian-Mauretanian coalition led by King Jugurtha and king Bocchus and captured the Numidian capital of Cirta.

105: Cimbrian War: Battle of Arausio where Cimbri, Teutons, and Ambrones divide a huge Roman army (80,000 men plus support personnel) led by two rivals, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio. Only Caepio, Maximus and a few hundred Romans escaped with their lives across the river choked with corpses. The Battle of Arausio was the costliest defeat Rome suffered since Cannae and the losses and long-term consequences were far greater.

104 to 100: Second Servile War in Sicily, led by Athenion and Tryphon.

104: Cimbrian War: Rome declared a state of emergency and the constitution was suspended to allow Gaius Marius, the victor over Jugurtha of Numidia, to be elected consul for an unprecedented five years in a row, starting in 104. He was given free rein to build a new army and took the opportunity to make sweeping reforms in structure, organisation, recruitment, pay and strategy. Marius created a professional standing force composed of able-bodied but landless volunteers. Meanwhile the Cimbri unaccountably lost the opportunity to invade Italy while Rome was without an army, instead trekking to Iberia where they experienced their first defeats.

102: Cimbrian War: The Cimbri along with several other allied tribes finally invaded Italy, dividing their forces into two distinct armies which took separate routes south. Marius defeated the army of the Teutons and Ambrones at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

101: Cimbrian War: The main body of the Cimbri penetrated north Italy and ravaged the valley of the Po. Marius waited for reinforcements and then took on the Cimbri at the Battle of Vercellae near the confluence of the Sesia River with the Po on the Raudine Plain. The Cimbri were virtually annihilated, both their highest leaders, Boiorix and Lugius, fell, their womenfolk killed both themselves and their children in order to avoid slavery, bringing the Cimbrian War to an end. The war had two massive consequences:

The end of the Cimbrian War marked the beginning of the rivalry between Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla who had served under Marius during the Jugurthine War, and served during the Cimbrian War as military tribune. Their rivalry eventually led to the first of Rome’s great civil wars.
Following the victory at Vercellae, and without first asking permission from the Senate, Marius granted Roman citizenship to his Italian allied soldiers. Henceforth all Italian legions became Roman legions and the allied cities of the Italian peninsula began to demand a greater say in the external policy of the Republic. This led eventually to the Social War.

So the final part of the Cimbrian War sowed the seeds of civil strife in Italy for the next 15 years.

1st century BC

91 to 87: The Social War between Rome and its Italian allies who wanted Roman citizenship and an equal share in power. Only won by Rome granting citizenship and other rights to the allies. Once achieved, this hastened the Romanisation of the entire Italian peninsula but was a bitter and destructive internecine struggle.

89 to 63: Mithridatic Wars against Mithridates VI, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia.

88 to 87: First Civil War between Marius and Sulla. First march on Rome by Sulla.

83: Sulla’s second march on Rome. Mass proscriptions i.e. lists of Sulla’s political enemies to be hunted down and liquidated. Not quite Stalin’s Russia, but similar in intent.

80: Sulla is persuaded to give his junior general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus known as Pompey, his first ‘triumph’ in Rome.

73 to 71: Rebellion of Spartacus also known as the Third Servile War.

71: Pompey is granted his second ‘triumph’ for his victories in Spain.

70: Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, generally referred to as Crassus, are made consuls.

67: The Gabinian Law is passed, giving Pompey extraordinary power to deal with pirates in the Adriatic.

66: The Manilian Law is passed, giving Pompey extraordinary power to deal with Mithridates VI of Pontus.

64: Galatia becomes a client state of Rome.

63: Pompey defeats the Seleucid Antiochus XIII and incorporates Syria as a province of the Roman empire.

62: Pompey returns to Italy, and disbands his army upon landing.

61: Cicero’s accuses Catalinus of being the ringleader of a coup attempt. Pompey holds another ‘triumph’ in Rome celebrating his military achievements in the East.

60: Gaius Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus make a behind-closed-doors deal to share power between them, bypassing traditional constitutional arrangements, a moment later writers lamented as sealing the fate of the republic. It comes to be known as the First Triumvirate, or the Gang of Three as Beard jokily calls it.

58 to 51: Under the terms of the triumvirate, Pompey campaigns in the east, Caesar conquers Gaul.

58: Caesar attacks the Helvetii while on migration and defeats them.

58 to 57: Cicero is exiled from Rome.

56: The navies of Rome and the Veneti Gauls clash resulting in a Roman victory, the first recorded naval battle in the Atlantic Ocean.

55: Caesar attempts to invade Britain.

54: Caesar successfully invades Britain but then withdraws to Gaul. The island will be decisively conquered under Claudius.

54: Ambiorix of the Eburones tribe destroys around 9,000 Roman soldiers at the Battle of Atuatuca, up towards the modern French border with Belgium, one of the most serious setbacks suffered by Julius Caesar during his conquest of Gaul.

53: Rome loses the Battle of Carrhae to the Parthians, on what is now the border between southern Turkey and Syria. Crassus, one of the Triumvirate, is captured and executed by the Parthians.

52: Julius Caesar is defeated at the Battle of Gergovia in south-central France by Vercingetorix.

52: After becoming trapped and besieged at Alesia, Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar.

51: Caesar’s successful siege of Uxellodunum ends the Gallic War.

49: Burebistas sends Acornion of Dionysopolis as ambassador to negotiate an alliance with Pompey.

49: Caesar decides to march back from Gaul into Italy to dispute ultimate power with Pompey. According to tradition the ‘die is cast’ for war when he leads his legions across the river Rubicon. Civil war between Caesar and Pompey begins.

48: The Battle of Pharsalus the decisive battle of Caesar’s Civil War fought near Pharsalus in central Greece. Although Pompey enjoyed the backing of a majority of Roman senators and the larger army, his forces were massacred by Caesar’s legions, battle hardened from their long wars in Gaul. Pompey survived the battle and fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated on the orders of Ptolemy XIII who thought it would please Caesar.

46: The Bellovaci unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule in Belgica. Caesar holds a ‘triumph’ through Rome in which he displays peoples he has defeated and loot he has taken. The parade featured floats with people posing in dramatic tableaux, and placards, one of which read pithily: veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered. This referred to Caesar’s quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela, in Turkey, up towards the Black Sea, in 47 (SPQR p.290). The historian Suetonius says Caesar used it in his triumph but the biographer Plutarch says he used it in a report to the Senate. Either way it’s indicative of the way the phrase was still quotable 150 years later and a token of Caesar’s skill as a writer, rhetorician and self publicist.

44: The Allobroges unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule in southern Gaul.

44: Caesar becomes dictator for life. On the ‘Ides of March’ (15th) he is killed by conspirators including Brutus and Cassius. Octavian, son of Caesars niece Atia, is posthumously adopted as his heir.

43 to 36: a Second Triumvirate is set up by Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Gaius Octavius (Octavian) and Marcus Lepidus, in opposition to the assassins of Caesar, chief among them Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus (p.341). Following the innovation of Sulla in the 80s, the triumvirate draws up a long list of proscriptions i.e. people they want to see liquidated. The list includes the most eminent writer of Latin prose, Cicero, who is caught trying to flee, and beheaded in 43 (p.341).

42: Octavian and Antony defeat Republicans under Brutus and Cassius at the Battle of Philippi (Greece)

36: Octavian strips Lepidus of all power but the purely ceremonial Pontifex Maximus (supreme priest). Lepidus dies of old age in 12 BC, leaving Mark Anthony, allied with Cleopatra of Egypt, as Octavian’s main enemy.

33: The Belgic Morini and the Celts of Aquitania unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule.

31: 2 September Battle of Actium. Octavian defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt.

29: Octavian’s ‘triumph’ displays images of the people he defeated in the East along with such vast amounts of loot that it took 3 days to process through central Rome.

27: Octavian is given extraordinary powers and the name Augustus by the Roman Senate. Although many of its constitutional forms live on for centuries, the Republic is in effect dead, and historians date the start of the Roman Empire from either 31 or 27.

Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 4, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History

Tagged Achaean War, Africa, Allobroges, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Antiochus III, Antiochus the Great, Antiochus XIII, Aquae Sextiae, Aquitania, Asia Minor, Attalus III, Battle of Actium, Battle of Arausio, Battle of Burdigala, battle of Cannae, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of Lake Regillus, Battle of Magnesia, Battle of Philippi, Battle of Pydna, Battle of the Allia, Battle of Zama, Battle of Zela, Bellovaci, Boii, Brennus, Brutus, Carthage, Cassius, Catalinus, Celts, Cicero, Cimbri, Cimbrian War, Cleopatra of Egypt, Corsica, Crassus, First Civil War, First Macedonian War, First Punic War, First Samnite War, First Servile War, First Triumvirate, Fourth Macedonian War, Gaius Marius, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Gallia Narbonensis, Gaul, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Great Goddess, Greece, Hannibal, Hannibal Barca, history, Iberia, Illyria, Jugurtha, Jugurthine War, Julius Caesar, Kingdom of Pontus, Latin War, Lepidus, Livy, Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravalla, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, Macedonian Kingdom, Marcus Junius Silanus, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marius Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Mark Antony, Mary Beard, military history, Mithridates VI, Mithridatic Wars, Morini, Numantia, Numidia, Octavian Caesar, optimates, Parthians, Pergamon, Pharnaces II, Philip V, Plutarch, Pompey, Pontus, populares, proscriptions, Publius Cornelius Scipio, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, Quintus Servilius Caepio, rape of Lucretia, Rape of the Sabine Women, Rebellion of Spartacus, Rebellion of the mercenaries, Roman Republic, Roman timeline, Rome, Romulus, Romulus and Remus, Sabines, sack of Corinth, sack of Rome, Sallust, Sardinia, Scipio Africanus, Second Battle of Cirta, Second Macedonian War, Second Punic War, Second Samnite War, Second Servile War, Second Triumvirate, Seleucid Empire, Seleucid War, Senones, Sibylline Books, Sicily, Social War, Spartacus, SPQR, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Suetonius, Syria, Tarquin Superbus, Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, Teutones, Third Macedonian War, Third Punic War, Third Samnite War, Third Servile War, Titus Tatius, Treaty of Phoenice, Twelve Tables, Utica, Vercingetorix, war

Posted by Simon on February 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/02/04/spqr-mary-beard-4-republican-timeline/

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The decline in academic writing for a general audience

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The Life of Caesar

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All posts tagged Crassus

The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 1

The OUP edition (1996)

The Penguin edition (1951)

The Roman constitution

Marius

Pompey and Crassus

The first triumvirate

Back in Rome

Luca

Clodius and Milo

Should Caesar give up his command?

Crossing the Rubicon

Gaul and its inhabitants

Which edition?

The decline in academic writing for a general audience

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Roman reviews

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The Life of Julius Caesar by Plutarch

Rex’s reservations

The Life of Caesar

Thoughts

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Roman reviews

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Plutarch’s life of Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 to 53 BC)

The life

Plutarch’s summary

Superstitions and omens

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Plutarch

Rex Warner (1905 to 1986)

Bill Thayer

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) 4. Republican timeline

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8th century BC

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